Platform Election Policies, Now and Then

In recent episodes of this podcast we’ve explored the policies and practices of the social media platforms with regard to elections. In this week’s episode, we’ll hear two segments on this theme. First, an interview with Daniel Kriess, an Associate Professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a principal researcher at the UNC Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. With Ph.D candidate Erik Brooks, Daniel is the author of Looking to the Midterms: The State of Platform Policies on U.S. Political Speech, a recent post at Tech Policy Press.

In the second segment, we zoom out and discuss the trajectory of tech company policies on elections over the last twenty six years with Katie Harbath and Collier Fernekes, authors of a recent report for the Bipartisan Policy Center that was based on an archive of public announcements made by the firms. Katie is a former Facebook public policy director and now leads Anchor Change, a consultancy she started after leaving the tech company. Collier is a research analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center.