2026.10.08 | Substack | META | Stratechery Interview: Katie Harbath on Facebook Politics
原标题：An Interview with Katie Harbath About Disrupting Politics at Facebook (Stratechery Interview 10-8-2026)
An Interview with Katie Harbath About Disrupting Politics at Facebook
Thursday, October 8, 2026
Good morning,
Today’s Stratechery Interview is with Katie Harbath. I first met Harbath when we worked together at The Badger Herald at the University of Wisconsin; we both ended up in tech via very circuitous routes. While I went to Asia and eventually went to business school and then started Stratechery, Harbath started working in Republican politics and was one of Facebook’s first hires in Washington D.C.
Harbath is — for better or worse, as she will attest — one of the most innovative and influential people in terms of transforming how Washington D.C. thinks about tech and its influence on politics, particularly when it comes to election campaigns. After helping to drag the Republican Party online, she joined Facebook as its liaison to Republican political candidates, before building out Facebook’s global political organization. Harbath has worked on elections from the U.S. to India to Brazil and everywhere in between, and, in the wake of Trump’s election in 2016, helped the company navigate its violent shift from beloved company to vilified pariah.
After spending a decade with Facebook, Harbath left in 2021 to start her own consultancy and newsletter. This week Harbath published her first book, Disrupting Politics: A Front Row Seat to the Collision of Technology and Democracy, a memoir of her two decades on the front lines of tech’s impact on politics, and in the end, politics’ impact on tech.
We talk about Harbath’s journey, from dolphin hijinks to pre-YouTube talk shows to bearing the weight of the world: what was Facebook thinking in the early 2010s, what did they think by the end of the decade, and what do they think now? Did the company have it right all along? Have they — and Harbath — taken too much responsibility for events that were out of their control? And, along the way, I explain why the entire topic unnerves me, and why I’m sympathetic to companies and people who simply don’t want to involved in politics; unfortunately politics comes for us all.
As a reminder, all Stratechery content, including interviews, is available as a podcast; click the link at the top of this email to add Stratechery to your podcast player.
On to the Interview:
An Interview with Katie Harbath About Disrupting Politics at Facebook
This interview is lightly edited for clarity.
Topics:
Background | The Inescapable Political | The Political World Gets Online | Facebook and 2016 | The Rearview Mirror | Philosophical Questions | The Value of Values
Background
Katie Harbath, welcome to Stratechery.
Katie Harbath: Hi Ben, thanks for having me.
Well, first off, congratulations on publishing a book. We are talking on Tuesday, October 6th, and Disrupting Politics: A Front Row Seat to the Collision of Technology and Democracy was published today. How does it feel?
KH: It feels great. It’s been five years in the making to get to this point, and I’ve always wanted to write a book, so to finally have it — not just to be able to hold it in my hand, but to have it out in the world — and I’m starting to get good feedback from it. Last month my terrified was a lot higher than my excited, and now it’s flipped.
Right. Well, five years reaffirms my commitment to not write a book, so that sounds about right.
KH: It took me a year to figure out how to write a book versus a newsletter. I was so used to writing shorter-form stuff that it really messed with my head, like, how do you do a longer-form thing? It took me a while to figure that out.
The problem is we’ve been friends since college, you are better at getting things done than basically anyone I know, and if it took you five years, and I’m an inveterate procrastinator — again, this sounds like a disaster.
So, yes, full disclosure: we have been friends since college. We worked together at the Badger Herald. However, you have to pretend this is our first time talking, and I’m asking about your background. Where are you from, and how did you get to where you are now?
KH: From Green Bay, Wisconsin, a proud Packers fan and owner. My family is still back there.
Yes, that’s our real disclosure. We are two Packers owners here, and I’d like to express my discontent with the current state of the Packers. But anyhow, continue.
KH: Oh my God, that’s a different podcast that we need to do to talk about the current state of the Packers.
And then I went to UW-Madison for journalism and political science, and thought I was going to be a print journalist and instead — this is the very beginning of sort of the Internet era, era of the Blogspot, we digitized the newspaper when we were there and all of that, and ended up going into, met some of our other folks at the Herald who went into politics — and ended up going into political communication.
Wait, so was there no Badger Herald website when you started?
KH: It might have been very rudimentary. By “going digital” I meant in terms of, we used to take it to the printer. We would print it out and paste it up on those big things.
That’s right. We actually submitted — were they PDFs?
KH: And then it wasn’t even PDFs, we were in that paste-up room where there was the light board.
No, no, no, I meant by the time we graduated. I just remember being there on September 11th. It was a bizarre experience, writing a headline for — it’s like, what are we doing here? We’re just a bunch of kids.
KH: On the front page, we didn’t do a headline, I went and found the old paper last year, I went into the archives, because we just had the photo. We were all sitting around like, “How do we even describe what is happening?” — in hindsight we should have done a headline, but we rationalized just doing a picture.
Yeah, what crazy times for sure. It’s — I don’t want to think about it. It’s been 25 years, it makes you feel very old. There’s a lot of dialogue online, between people who have no recollection of that, and it’s like, man, we are getting old.
KH: We are, although it isn’t that long ago either but it does feel that way, because I graduated in ’03, and I never imagined I was going to work 10 years at a company that didn’t exist when I graduated in ’03. Because then I went and worked in political campaigns through the 2010 cycle, early-day social media etc., and then 10 years at Facebook running their global elections team and building that team that worked with politicians and governments on how to use the platform.
Yeah, we’re going to get to that. But just to tie into the age question, you talked in your book, early on, it just stood out to me, about how you didn’t have a cell phone until your sophomore year. I’m not sure I got one until my junior year, but then I realized that matches, because I think I was a year ahead of you. How much of your outlook do you think was framed by being in this narrow generation that experienced the before and after of the Internet? The late Gen X, early millennial — I think it’s called Xillennial or whatever, some terrible name I refuse to use. That’s the first time I’ve used it.
KH: There’s elder millennial too, which I also hate.
Well, you are a millennial and I’m Gen X, we are literally at the crossover. But how do you think that’s influenced your perspective, both as you look back on your career and as you look back now while writing this book?
KH: I think a ton, because I can both understand folks that are older than us who don’t understand this technology as much, and sort of where they’re going and all of that — but then also, I still remember the first time I saw somebody do a search online, it was eighth grade, and they logged into Prodigy). And being on the cutting edge, and constantly having new technologies that we were having to learn and figure out how to incorporate into our lives — I grew up with that, and so I learned how to adapt with those, in a way that I think those that are older than us haven’t been able to do.
Do you think that being there at the beginning, and by “the beginning” I mean the web, we weren’t there for PCs, I mean I remember when we got our first PC at our house — do you think that gives a fundamentally more optimistic view, a more pessimistic view, or is it almost a more realistic view? That these technologies arrive and they change things.
KH: At least for me, is it’s a more realistic view, I like to see the world as it is, and how we operate within that — versus, I do like to think about what we aspire to, but I get really frustrated with people who wish the world were a certain way, and they want to operate within that way. And I’m like, but that’s not the real world, that’s not what we’re living in right now, and we need to deal with the now. And I do think that being in the timeframe we were at, you kind of had to — this is what we’re living through, this is what we have to figure out, so we better just figure out how to do it.
The Inescapable Political
Yeah. I have a meta take on this interview, in that it both applies to this conversation and also, as you will find, serves as my review/critique of the book. I think if you were not my friend, I would not do this interview. And it’s not because I don’t find the topics interesting, or I don’t have opinions on them. Rather, it’s that I see nothing but downside in terms of actually engaging on partisan topics. And there’s so much of what you got into that’s very partisan. You’re the shining example of what I mean, in that, as you detail in the book, you’ve been vilified on national TV for having a Republican background. You’ve been vilified for defending Facebook’s attempt to be neutral — most vociferously by the left, but also by the right — even as, if I can put words in your mouth, you’re pretty opposed to the current Republican president, and I think it’s safe to say Facebook as well. Is there any winning here?
KH: (laughing) Winning by whom?
By me doing this interview. You already went through all this. You don’t have any choice but to stay engaged.
KH: (laughing) That’s true. Well, I think the reason that I would say there is winning for you on this is that — and I write about this in the book — politics is involved in tech no matter what. Even if you don’t want it to be, politics is playing a bigger and bigger role in what is happening in Silicon Valley.
I’m a firm believer that you can’t stick your head in the sand on that, we’ve got to recognize that everything’s going to get politicized, in terms of the left and the right and what that looks like, and also internationally.
But I do think that, for you and how you’re thinking about this, what it means from the business perspective is important, because what happens in Washington and the states and in regulation could really impact how well these companies do.
I agree with that, and I certainly have covered the regulation area, even though I find that also very annoying. The thing I worry about, when it comes to things being politicized, is there’s actually no analysis to be done, no one’s actually listening to the arguments or what you have to say. And the example I always go back to is, I wrote an Article about Netflix versus Comcast. I remember I wrote it in London, and it was a fine Article, it got as much traction as any other Article does, it was about peerage, sharing traffic back and forth. It touched on questions around — here are the magic words — net neutrality, and my argument was I thought Netflix was actually in the wrong in this case, I thought they were abusing the concept of net neutrality to get favorable business terms, and were being disingenuous about it.
Fast forward two or three years later, the Trump administration is in place and they repeal Title II applying to net neutrality — which, by the way, had only been applied a year prior, so the entire Internet had existed without this the whole time. And I thought this was a bad move, this is regulation that was meant for phone lines, I didn’t think it was applicable to the Internet, so I wrote an Article saying this is fine, this is a good move. I basically had a week of living Katie Harbath’s life, in that I was the pinata for everyone. I had Ajit Pai tweeting my Article saying, “Oh, someone gets it”. I’m getting just vilified by people I thought were my friends — I mentioned even up to death threats, which I’m sure you’ve gotten plenty of. I was just totally unprepared, I wasn’t ready for it at all.
What kills me about it is I basically made the exact same argument I’d made a couple years prior in the Netflix-Comcast case, it was basically the same thing. This is the secret to writing for 13 years, you just keep applying the same opinion to different circumstances. But this time, no one actually cared about the argument, I got set on one side or the other, and that sucked. I’m interested in arguments, and so the partisan angle is frustrating not because of being on one side or the other, it’s because there aren’t actually arguments at stake, that was sort of my takeaway. Sorry, not to go on a long monologue, but that’s just the question I have.
KH: Well, and I think for me, and maybe it’s just because I’ve built up a thick skin from having this happen a lot — I’ve realized, and I think a lot of people know this, there’s the world that exists online where you’re getting tweeted at constantly and all that’s happening. But then there’s when I go into the rooms and I talk to a policymaker or somebody at a think tank, where you can actually have the more nuanced conversation, and people are appreciative of whatever I’m writing or talking about and wanting to engage on it a bit more.
So for me, the tradeoff is worth it for me, for what that might look like, and the influence I’m able to have — even now, on my own as a consultant — helping people think through how these technologies look, particularly in the elections and political context. Because not a lot of people want to touch it, it’s a lane for me to continue to be in.
Yeah, that’s a good point. If people like me don’t like it, you’re more than happy to fill the gap, that’s the optimistic spin.
The Political World Gets Online
I wanted to step back, I thought the first part of the book was super interesting. Most of the book is understandably very focused on your time at Facebook and a lot of the stuff that went down there, which we will get to. To me, the most fascinating part was — I wanted way more at the beginning about how the political world grappled with and reacted to technology generally. You graduate in 2003, you go to Washington, D.C., you’re selling perfume, you get a job at the RNC, and a month in, you write a memo. Tell me about this memo.
KH: I joined the Republican National Committee as a communications assistant. And as I was coming into the RNC, the guys running President Bush’s reelect were going over to the campaign. So I’m in the communications team, and given some of the digital stuff we had started to do at the Herald and at UW-Madison, I saw all this opportunity of things we could do online, and there was nobody there to do it at that point in time. So I decided to write this memo to my boss, like, “Hey, here’s a bunch of ideas I have of what we could do online”, and he was like, “Great, it’s yours, now figure it out”.
This is only 23 years ago, and the Republican National Committee has no one working on online stuff.
KH: They had just left to go over to the campaign, but yeah, it was still called e-Campaign, it was still very early days. And again, there’s no YouTube, there’s no Facebook at this time, there’s no Twitter, so “online” is a website, it’s an email campaign. Online donations are still very new at this time — people are still a little nervous about putting their credit card online, so it was very much a new thing that a lot of people in the political world just did not know what to do with.
So what was the 2004 campaign like? Was this the first official online campaign, or does that not count until 2008?
KH: It depends how you think about it. The first campaign websites were in ’96, so you could somewhat say that was the first online campaign. I think 2004 really was one where you really saw digital tools being used quite a bit, used for fundraising. We were doing a lot of online videos, even without YouTube, I talk about in the book how we dressed interns as dolphins, because we were trying to paint John —
Yeah, tell me about FlipperCam.com.
KH: We were trying to paint Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, as a flip-flopper. People who are older remember a TV show in the ’60s named Flipper), about a dolphin, and so we decided to — there were a lot of gimmicks that happened in campaigns, to try to get earned media, to try to drive the candidate bonkers, etc., and so we had these dolphins following around John Kerry wherever he was doing rallies and stuff.
They would try to stand in the background of cable news shots and then they would upload the videos — they would FTP them over dial-up, and it would take all night — and then I would have to edit them, and we’d have to do high-bandwidth, low-bandwidth, QuickTime, RealPlayer, and Windows, depending on what software people had. But we did a bunch of those microsites, I had to learn how to code HTML, CSS — this was not fancy stuff at all. But we didn’t have the money to necessarily pay for, or at least they weren’t willing to put the money in, to pay for official folks to do this.
So we did things like Kerry-opoly and Kerry on Iraq, because it got us earned media hits. People here in D.C. would write about it.
I was going to ask about this, one thing you emphasize in this period is how important it was that the press picked up on these stunts. Is that still the case, or was that really a relic of the time, that online was a way to get into the media?
KH: I think it still is, because look at the number of — like the RNC and others, who did an AI-generated campaign, and you do one ad, you run it somewhere, and then you get all this press about how the RNC was using AI to create stuff. So I do think that you still — and I think we’ll see it more as we go into the ’28 cycle with the presidential campaigns — it’s tricky now with AI, because it’s both a policy topic as well as how the campaigns are using it. Now it’s also what influencers are covering, and folks like yourself and other newsletter writers and stuff like that too, not just the mainstream press.
Well, it’s really interesting, because we’re going to get to the 2016 campaign in a little bit. But the 2016 campaign was ultimately — and I wrote my analysis of the structure of that campaign, which I think holds up pretty well, called The Voters Decide — and the argument there was, at the end of the day, all the coverage and the most important tool for the Trump campaign was the media, the traditional media.
KH: Yeah.
To the extent that Facebook mattered, there was a vacuum, and Trump rushed in to fill the gap, drove ratings, all these sorts of things. But it’s interesting the extent to which, for all the business model trouble and all the issues that traditional media faces, it’s still the number one target for all this sort of stuff.
KH: Yeah, and you’re seeing even here in the midterms — look at the amount of money being spent on traditional broadcast TV, even though a vast majority of people are watching streaming.
But is this because political consultants are incompetent, or does this still just work?
KH: They want to make money, let’s be honest. There’s a model for political consultants to get a percentage of a TV ad buy that never really translated into the digital buys. It’s different types of consultants. I think it’s more of a money thing, and a little bit of a challenge, because older voters still do watch local TV more and when you think about streaming, it gets a lot more complicated in terms of the microtargeting and everything else you have to do now. You are seeing a lot more digital, but I think it’s the money and I think it’s the older voters that is why a lot of money is still on broadcast.
I want to get to a few more of the stunt era of politics, but you do talk about how digital made it possible for people to come in from the outside, they could raise money outside of the structure, they could do all these sorts of things, and I think there’s a bit where you frame it as a little bit of a negative. But when you talk about political consultants getting paid by virtue of that’s how it works, and buying ads on TV, isn’t there an extent to which these people from the outside are succeeding, not because the platforms are biased toward them, but because there’s just incompetency at the center?
KH: Yeah, well, and there was also taking a lot for granted. I talk about this a lot in 2010 when I was at the Senatorial committee, and a lot of incumbents were losing because there were Tea Party challenger candidates that were using the Internet in ways that the other campaigns weren’t, and we could even talk about that with the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. Trump was willing to try anything that we were doing, and the Hillary team was basically, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you”, around using digital.
And so I agree that a lot of it is, people get set in their ways of how they want to do stuff, and there’s conventional wisdom, and there’s a lot of risk of being the ones to try something new and then you lose, and then you’re kind of painted with that picture of not a reliable consultant, or whatever it might be.
Right. Well, we’ll get to that. Before we get to the Facebook era, I have a couple more questions. What was Off the Record?
KH: (laughing) So this was a six-episode online video show that my colleague Mindy Finn and I did. Again, our first episode actually aired the day YouTube launched, so it’s not on YouTube, it’s somewhere in the RNC archives.
But we were 23, 24, somewhere in there, and we were interviewing folks like Senator John Thune, who was a freshman and Ari Fleischer, who was the Press Secretary at the White House. We were trying to — we were like, “The Internet doesn’t want something super polished that they can get on cable news, they want something that’s a little bit more relatable, kind of fun, maybe not as produced”, and so Mindy and I did that and put it out.
The first email we sent out was just from Mindy and Katie, and it said, “Off the Record,” and we got a higher open rate than emails from the President did — partially because some people thought it was not safe for work, we discovered around all of it, and it was actually wildly successful. Mark Halperin, who at the time was at ABC’s The Note — you have all these morning newsletters that go out in D.C. and have for a long time — and they started doing headlines like, “What do Mindy and Katie think about Iran’s nuclear capability?”, and we thought it was great, because we were like, “We’re getting attention, people love this”, our comms department did not. They did not think that us getting made fun of was great, and so we ended up getting shut down.
How critical is that? Like, I think you just said some magic words, “They did not think us being made fun of was good”, you guys thought it was great. Is that the generational divide between online and offline?
KH: I think so. I also think understanding, yes, we were being made fun of, but also we were breaking through, people were wanting to hear what we had to say. Same thing with the dolphins, there were all sorts of policy and research papers we could put out, op-eds you can run about John Kerry being a flip-flopper, but by having the dolphins, it tied that — there was a visual tie-in that was kind of funny, it was memorable.
So having two young women doing an online show with something different, and they enjoyed hearing our perspective, but it didn’t fit the old school mold of what political campaigns were used to doing, and so they weren’t quite sure how to deal with it.
Right, but there’s the point that you guys were being made fun of and you didn’t mind. Is that the key to being successful online? We’ve kind of talked about this before — you have to not worry about being criticized. But is it even more important, the key characteristic of being successful online, is you don’t mind being made fun of?
KH: I think so, and I think it’s having a thicker skin, knowing that you’re going to put yourself out there. I used to say this when we were at Facebook too — if you’re relevant, people are, even if they’re criticizing you, that means you’re relevant in some way. I try to spin it as a positive, maybe I need that as a coping mechanism, but I do think it shows that you’re at least getting attention.
What was the George Allen YouTube moment?
KH: Oh, gosh! So this was the first moment that I really started to get phone calls from folks on the Hill.
I do also want to mention, in 2004, bloggers were a big deal, because they had — Dan Rather, at the time anchor of CBS News, runs the story about President Bush’s military record and bloggers discovered that the documents that Dan Rather based that off of were falsified. It was kind of like the early-day influencers, and now campaigns and elected officials are like, “Wait, who are these blogger people, why do I need to worry about them?”.
Then YouTube comes along, and Senator George Allen) here in Virginia was at the top of his political game, talked about as a presidential contender, he gets caught on camera — campaigns would oftentimes send interns with video cameras to go tape the opponent at every public place they were at, in case they made a gaffe, so you could turn it into a campaign commercial. So what does Senator Allen do? He calls this campaign tracker — for the opposition — a racial slur word, and it doesn’t get picked up by the mainstream press here in D.C., but the other campaign puts it on YouTube and it goes viral and it basically destroys his political career.
It was the first time I remember it really waking up people in D.C., like, “Wait a second, how do I make sure that doesn’t happen to me, and it happens to my opponent?”, so now I’m getting calls like, “Okay, maybe this Internet thing isn’t something we can ignore anymore, please, Katie, come and explain this to us”.
Right. So it’s great for you.
KH: Yeah, it was great for me.
Well, what’s interesting about that is, we talked before about the question of how much digital actually still matters in terms of earned media, in terms of the traditional media. But the point here is it didn’t actually go out through earned media — it went out on its own.
KH: No.
It really was this third new thing that was also not controllable.
KH: And it was organic, there was no paid money behind it, they weren’t running it as an ad, and this is something I don’t think we talk about enough today, too, because everyone pays attention to how much money is behind advertising — which is an important conversation. But there’s a lot happening on the organic side, too, and things that are just getting spread around and going viral.
As something that would come up for people criticizing you, you worked for the Rudy Giuliani campaign for president, which obviously fizzled out. Not very digital-forward, I think, is a fair way to characterize it.
KH: (laughing) Yeah.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama comes along out of nowhere, wins the Democratic nomination, wins the election. How happy were you when he won?
KH: Ah, yes.
Because on one hand, you’re a Republican operative, so your team just lost.
KH: Yeah.
On the other hand, he’s walking validation of everything you’ve been trying to convince Republican leadership about for the last decade.
KH: Yeah, it was great. It was a real contradiction. Again, when I was on the Giuliani campaign, he was considered America’s mayor, we’re not that far off 9/11, he’s considered very moderate.
Everyone assumed he was going to get nominated.
KH: He was very moderate, and everybody assumed it was going to be Rudy and Hillary that were the nominees in ’08.
Yep.
KH: Part of the reason the campaign was really reluctant to do much online was they were worried about the comment section, they were worried about what people were going to put in the comment section about him dressing in drag, or his positions on gay marriage or abortion, and all that kind of stuff. And worried that voters wouldn’t realize that that’s not endorsed by the campaign, and what a comment section was. It’s kind of wild to think about that today, but that was their concern and so I was just banging my head against the wall trying to do whatever we could online within the constraints they were giving me.
So when you all of a sudden have Obama coming from out of kind of nowhere — not really nowhere, but really trying different things and winning — so now I’m again getting phone calls from the Senatorial committee and others who are like, “Maybe we should have listened to you more, how do we do this?”, and so it gave me a lot more leeway when I would suggest things to folks, of them actually agreeing to let me do it.
It sounds like there’s a theme here of your professional interests flipping with your personal interests. The people who listen to you the most seem to succeed, if you don’t want them to.
KH: Yeah, very true.
Facebook and 2016
(laughing) Well, so you go to work — this is about when you go to Facebook. Tell me the story of joining up with Facebook. I think the reason why Facebook targeted you is interesting in its own right.
KH: In late 2007, early 2008, when Facebook created Pages and Ads, they created a Page for every member of Congress at the time using their Wikipedia profile and they hired a gentleman by the name of Adam Conner, who came from Democratic politics. So Adam was — I got to know Adam when I was still working at the Senatorial committee — he was my contact, we’d be at conferences together, all that jazz.
So a week after the 2010 election, I get a phone call from Adam, and he’s like, “Hey, would you come over? I want to have coffee, I want to discuss something with you”, and he basically was like, “President Obama is going to run for reelection again, and there’s going to be all these Republicans running for the nomination, and Republicans want to talk to a Republican, they don’t want to talk to me, because they’re worried that I’m going to go turn around and tell the Democrats what they’re doing”.
And he’s like, “Everybody in the space that’s going to go work on the presidential campaigns — so would you be interested in coming to Facebook and being my Republican counterpart?”, and so then I got hired. It was about a four-month interview process, and I started in February 2011, and my job initially was to work with Republicans in the United States.
The reason I think that story is interesting is it emphasizes what was Facebook’s — you frame it, maybe in retrospect a little more critically, but I think it’s totally fine — some might say naive, I might say idealistic, I might say sort of realistic approach to politics, which is, we already have someone associated with Democrats, someone associated with Republicans, we’re just trying to have people use our platform and that really quite tangibly is how you ended up at Facebook, for that exact impulse.
KH: Yeah, and it was sort of a soft-power thing too, if you will, which was that these members were wanting more and more to know how to use Facebook, because, again, they saw what Obama had done in ’08 and so they might not want to talk to Facebook about various public policy positions. But our theory at the time, though, didn’t really come true — it’s like, at some point in time these policymakers are going to regulate us, it’d be nice if they knew how the platform worked, but also if they saw it as helpful to them doing their jobs, because that might help improve the reputation, or how they feel about us and the company.
Got it. So how did your job evolve over time? Were you and Adam, for a while, the Democrat and Republican liaisons to Congress, and then where did it go from there?
KH: We were that through the 2012 cycle and then coming out of 2012, with Obama getting heralded for his use of data and digital, at the same time our public policy team, and Facebook, started to be used a lot more around the world. So we started to get a lot more world leaders and others wanting to be like, “How do I do what Obama did? How do I use you all in the same way?”, and we didn’t have — we had somebody in Europe — we didn’t have a formalized international team.
So, you’re going to sense a theme here, I wrote another memo to my bosses about how I thought we needed — if we wanted the 2016 U.S. election to be the Facebook election, which is kind of what our goal was coming out of 2012, because Google had these huge presences at conventions, YouTube debates, all those things happening — and I was like, if we’re going to do that, we should also be building out these teams around the world and trying Facebook live streams and telling people what people were talking about on the platform, trying this out in other elections so that we can be prepared when we hit the U.S. one.
So in 2013, I started — they were like, “Yes, go ahead and do that” — and so I started building out the international team.
Why did there need to be a Facebook election?
KH: It was relevance, frankly, at the time. Like, in 2012, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube are all fighting to be the place that people were talking. Whether it was the World Cup, the Olympics, any big moment, and that included elections.
At the time, remember, the relationship between politicians and tech was still very positive. Obama’s doing a live stream with Mark Zuckerberg, they’re wanting to come to campus and get a tour, and they wanted the picture, because they wanted to look cool and techie and innovative. It was seen as something that could be very positive for us, because that’s what was happening coming out of the Obama win and so we wanted to double down on that for 2016, foolishly thinking that would still be the case no matter who won.
Well, let’s get to 2016. You mentioned before that you guys basically offered your services to both sides, and the Trump campaign took you up on it completely. You said you built out live streaming, and the first person to do a live stream — Donald Trump, immediately.
KH: Donald Trump.
He’s a walking validation of all your theses. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign is not doing anything with you as you mentioned. How does that happen, when the Obama campaign, as you noted, was heralded for winning digital just four years prior? Were they trying to do the same thing as four years prior, was it just an internal, “We’re not going to be like them”, sort of thing? At the risk of getting into candidate psyche, what was your view at the time?
KH: I was pulling my hair out in confusion, it was really frustrating, because you could see what each side was doing, and I’m like, “I don’t understand why they don’t see what the Trump team’s doing, and we’re offering the same things”, they just weren’t as willing to pivot.
I also think, too, they had their plan and they were very much sticking to it. I think there was a bit of hubris in it too, where they were kind of like, “We know what we’re doing, we’ll call you when we need you”, and we’re just running the same playbook as they had before — which is a trend you see in politics, where it’s like, if you won doing something, you’re going to keep doing it and that can sometimes make it so that you’re not innovating, and that’s when somebody new can come in and completely upset the apple cart, because you aren’t willing to change and innovate as well. And I think that was part of what was happening with the Clinton campaign.
Well, so obviously Trump wins. And the way I’ve sort of talked about it — you had the Clinton campaign, which didn’t really use digital, you had the New York Times writing about Hillary’s emails, you had all these different factions on the Democratic side, by and large, that are about to go to war, and everyone’s like, “What if we just blame Facebook?”. Is that a fair characterization of what you think happened — you are the scapegoat?
KH: We certainly played a role, yes, but we were kind of a scapegoat, and I think for a couple of reasons. One, Trump came out of winning being like, “I won because of Facebook“, and everyone’s trying to figure out how he won, because all the polls were saying it was Clinton, all the conventional wisdom said it should have been Hillary Clinton. So people are trying to find an excuse, and they’re like, “Oh, if Trump’s saying it was because of Facebook, then what ads was he running, who was he targeting, was he doing something nefarious?”, and then it was these Macedonian teens that were running fake news to make money — that story comes out right around the election as well.
Then you have Mark make the comment where he was like, “It’s crazy that Facebook would have had this sort of impact”, he’s not wrong, but it just didn’t fit the zeitgeist of what everybody was talking about and trying to find somebody to blame.
And we did, in hindsight — and I think Mark talks about this too a lot — we didn’t push back on that enough, soon enough, around all that, and so we became a very convenient dumping ground.
All your visions and everything you’re working on — where are you today, what does it look like if Hillary Clinton wins that election?
KH: I think the backlash on tech still would have happened, but it would have happened a little bit later, and I think it wouldn’t have been as intense as it is now.
I still think the amount of power — we were already thinking about that before the election happened, about the fact that as we get more users and all that, the regulators are going to set their sights on us at some point in time. But I think that my work would have been — they would have naturally said a lot about what Hillary did on digital, it would have looked very good, and I probably would have gotten, rather than getting a lot more resources to build out civic integrity, I would have gotten a lot more resources to keep building out people to do these trainings, these live streams, all the types of partnerships and stuff that we were doing during the 2016 cycle.
The Rearview Mirror
Doesn’t this fit the critique about what bias Silicon Valley might have, like basically — there’s a lot of language in here about, “It wasn’t cool anymore”, people are taking the Obama campaign off their profiles, all this rending of garments within Facebook itself, is there a bit where actually the lying to yourself was before, in that you weren’t neutral — you were operating in a neutral manner, but that’s what you regretted the most, that you had operated in a neutral manner because the wrong person won?
KH: Yeah. And I think not being honest about, like, trying to think that neutrality was going to save us, that it was going to be a shield.
Right, but save you from what? Save you from the press, or save you from yourselves?
KH: Both. I think there was a lot of it external, of like, how do we make sure — we don’t want anybody saying that we were putting our thumb on the scale, we were very careful to be offering the same thing. But then at the end of the day, it didn’t matter that we offered the same thing to Trump and Hillary, we still got blamed for how Trump used it, even though that wasn’t under our control.
I don’t know, I still think I would have operated in the same way, it was just more of an acknowledgement that, at that point in time, yes, Facebook would get credit — there were other scandals and stuff that people got pissed off at Facebook for, but we still weren’t used to what we were talking about earlier, of like, you’re just going to get criticized no matter what, make the best decision you can.
So in retrospect, the thing that struck me about this whole time period, and even the front part of the book where I wanted more on FlipperCam or whatever it’s called, and all this buildup to here — there’s a constant foreshadowing within the book that, “I regret all this, this is all terrible,” etc, and I’m looking at it and I’m like, “I don’t know, it feels like you played it pretty straight”. You were online trying to figure stuff out, once you go to Facebook, the entire reason you’re hired is so Facebook can be neutral, you offer the things to both campaigns. Yes, you got killed for it, it’s understandable that you did, but it doesn’t feel like you did anything wrong?
KH: Well, this is what I struggle with, because it’s hard to know, because there’s so many voices on the outside saying I did something wrong and there’s parts of it where I’m like, “No, I think I would have still done it the same way”, I don’t know what other better way there was to do it.
And one of the things I was trying really hard in this book — and maybe I over-indexed a little bit on it — was being intellectually honest about the role, and about, “If you could wave a magic wand, would you do something different or not”.
Right, but here’s the question, what would you do different?
KH: Well, there’s some stuff. I do think — and again, this is if I controlled the world type thing — but I do think around how we thought about measurement and clicks and engagement, we just thought more was better constantly. More is better, so if that’s what people are clicking on, just keep doing it, and we weren’t thinking about where that was driving the conversation, and what that might be looking like in terms of polarization and stuff online, so that’s one.
The other one is, if I could, I would have built the political ad transparency tool a lot sooner. This is something we built after the 2016 election, where people can see all the political ads that are running for the seven years and so that would have given a lot more transparency into what Trump and Hillary were actually doing, which may not have saved us.
Right. Or not doing.
KH: Or not doing. It may not have saved us, but at least if you don’t give people what actually happened, they’re going to fill the vacuum with their own theories of what happened.
I think a critique I have of the book is actually the exact same critique I have of Facebook, which is that a lot of the stuff that happened here was actually out of your control and it was, to your point, going to happen anyways. There’s an over-assumption — on one hand, it’s bad to not take responsibility and not take accountability, but it can also be equally bad to take too much responsibility and too much accountability.
KH: Yes.
I think that happened for Mark in particular, the first few years right afterwards.
KH: Yeah.
And I feel like maybe there’s still a lot more Facebook in you than you realize.
KH: There’s still a lot of blue in this body, yeah. Again, it’s really hard to continue to try to believe that, or at least balance those things, when even still today I’m constantly getting feedback from online and other people of like, all of this is horrible, all of social media is horrible, it just destroyed the world.
Actually, no, there’s still a lot of good that came from this and it’s not just us — like you were saying, the broader media environment, there’s a lot of other things that went into this.
If there wasn’t Facebook, it would have been another company.
KH: Yeah, it would have been another company and it also just drives me nuts that the Democrats aren’t willing to be introspective about their own missteps in all of it, and then also — like you pointing out about the New York Times and what they covered, and the other media. And so for everybody else it was like, oh great, we can all just be pissed off at Facebook together, and we didn’t do enough.
Mark talks about that in his recent profile, you interviewed the guy who wrote it, around Mark being like, “We took on too much responsibility, so we became that dumping ground”.
I think you see [Anthropic CEO] [Dario [Amodei] and [OpenAI CEO] [Sam [Altman] and others learning from that right now, where they’re kind of being like, “No, we’re not going to be the only ones trying to figure this out — government, you’re going to come in here too”, others, they’re trying really hard to make sure they don’t become what Facebook did.
Oh, interesting, I actually didn’t think about that connection. I want to go back to my initial comment about maybe it’s self-rationalization to avoid controversy, but I don’t see the value in dipping the toe in very bright partisan things. It’s fine for me to write about net neutrality, it’s not useful to write about net neutrality when it is the topic du jour of the day. And by the way, just a reminder, I was totally right, everyone was going crazy about net neutrality at the time. But you were pretty harsh on Meta for taking this posture, basically like, “Actually, that whole decade was a mistake, we don’t want to be involved, we’re going to try to — of course politics is going to be on our platform, we’re not going to emphasize it”. Is that a fair characterization of what they’re doing, and of how you feel about it?
KH: It’s a fair characterization of what they were doing, I think that changed with Trump coming back in on his second term.
But yeah, I was pretty frustrated by it and it was personal. This has been my life’s work, I spent so much time doing it, and now it was like, “We don’t like the controversy, we don’t want any of this, so we’re just going to downrank it, we don’t want this stuff happening on our platform”, and I’m like, “You don’t get to just have that choice, you’re a part of this”, I think you’ve got to confront it head on, what that looks like.
And so I was pretty frustrated by the fact that they tried to pull back for multiple years, and then all of a sudden Trump comes along and the political winds are now back in their favor of having more of that content, and so then they’re like, “Oh, people want it again”, and I’m like, “Come on, guys, you can see the cycles to it”, but I will fully admit my bias in that, because it was my work that I was seeing being pulled back on.
Well, does this go back to, why did 2016 have to be the Facebook Election — is the actual answer because 2012 was the Google Election, and there’s just a degree of, we have to react and do what other people are doing and that’s sort of been the bigger issue?
KH: I think so, yeah. And it’s pure competition of wanting to be competing with all those folks for users, for advertisers, for all that kind of stuff, and so it was like, “Okay, what do we need to do to make sure that we are not just on par, but doing better than all those other companies?”.
Philosophical Questions
How much — maybe this is a late-at-night sort of question — but to what extent, you talk a lot about what online enabled, and I think your frustration probably shines brightest when you’re talking about the Tea Party era. Like, “We created these tools, and holy cow, look at these people that are leveraging them, I can’t believe what’s happening”. But how much of this is — is there an extent where actually maybe we don’t like democracy too much? Maybe people have too much of a voice? Do you ever feel a tension there, in terms of, that’s the reality of being online? It’s not that people are being misled, it’s that actually I’m not sure I like what people actually think.
KH: Well, this was the dream in the early 2000s, was to have the President of the United States his or herself using these tools to directly talk to voters. We thought that was the ultimate of democracy.
You got it!
KH: We got it. Not sure, not what we envisioned, but that’s what we got. And I do think about that a lot, because more people being able to have a voice has actually done a lot for a lot of different issues that before would never have gotten the attention of the old school media gatekeepers. A lot of people like to reminisce and think the good old days were better, and those things had problems too.
But then it’s like, who gets to pick about whose voice matters more than others? And I feel like — both of us being from the Midwest, sometimes I’m like, that’s a very elitist position, that they get to decide whose voices matter more than others. So I don’t have a grand answer to it, but yeah, I have definitely sat around and pondered that before, of is it good that everybody has an opportunity and a megaphone in which to say whatever the heck they want?
Right. There’s a tension running through this whole book, which is, you look at regret with the early years of trying to be totally neutral, and then there’s the end state, which is, they’re not really involved, and you can’t just advocate responsibility and it’s like, “Well, the only middle state is actually not just having power, but exerting it, definitionally, on one side or the other, on issue after issue”, and you can say, “We’re just trying to show what’s true” — who decides what’s true? It’s the classic conundrum that’s been a question for philosophers for years and years. So I don’t know, did young Katie actually have it right all along?
KH: It’s very possible. I think it’s hard for current-day Katie to say that about herself or not. I don’t know. I talk about this a little bit in the book too — yes, there’s some regret, but there’s also a lot of it where I’m kind of like, “Yeah, I feel kind of good about the decisions we made, and some of the things I tried to do”, but that’s a very hard position to take when a lot of what’s happening—
Because you have to accept the consequences of that.
KH: Yeah.
The Value of Values
I think this is actually a very full-circle moment — the one topic I don’t see as partisan but I’ve decided I will consistently make a point about is questions like the First Amendment and censorship. I got, I think, fairly radicalized during COVID about this. It was pretty jarring, it was one of those things where you thought it would sort of tamp down once there was a new President, and it actually got way worse. And I’m like, “Holy cow, maybe the slippery slope is real, this is not great”. And actually, you know what, neutrality and the First Amendment — you make this point in there, and you highlight about Facebook that they didn’t have values to fall back on, it just felt like everything was reactionary and you come back to that point again and again and I think the, “2016 has to be the Facebook Election”, is actually evidence of that.
And you go back to the history of Silicon Valley, and you go back to our history at the Badger Herald — we suddenly had a bunch of protesters outside our office because of an advertisement that was run and we were actually a real newspaper that actually made a lot of money, and the editorial team was totally separate from the advertising team. We had nothing to do with the ad, and we’re like, you know what, we’re just going to say we support the First Amendment, people can say what they want. And it was controversial, but also easy, because if you just have a principle, you just follow the principle and it was easier then, because that was an argument that resonated.
I think the frustration for me, and the challenge for Facebook and all these companies, is Mark Zuckerberg tried to get back to this in 2019, that was his response to 2017, 2018, trying to make everyone happy — no one’s going to be happy, he goes to Georgetown in 2019 and it’s like, “We believe in the First Amendment, that’s what we’re going to base things on”, and it’s funny that he gets vilified by the right for the 2020 election, when Facebook was the last platform to not really censor or tamp down Trump. And I don’t know, what bothers me and concerns me is the fact that that used to be a universal thing you could call on. I wrote an article in 2020 with the Joe Rogan Spotify thing, where Spotify, a European company, is like, look, we just support free speech, and I’m like, unfortunately, guys, I agree with you, that’s a good principle — the earned media, the mainstream media, doesn’t seem to abide by that anymore and is that the biggest problem here? Yes, that should be a value, but if it’s not a universal, broad value, everyone’s out to sea.
KH: It’s a challenge, because it’s particularly on the left that that value has deteriorated over the last two decades around freedom of speech and what that looks like. And so, yeah, it’s a challenge. You can’t fall back — I mean, you can fall back on it, it’s just you’re going to get a heck of a lot more criticism about it.
Right. It’s become partisan, that’s what bothers me about it. It used to be the universal value, it wasn’t right or left. Like, that’s what we fell back on in 2000 or whatever it was. I’m just expressing my frustration. Couldn’t this be a universal thing?
KH: Yeah, no, it frustrates me too, because — I just saw The Social Reckoning last night, and what’s frustrating me about it is, Sorkin just keeps having this Bill Burr character be like, “Just fact-check political ads”, and I’m like, “Okay, you’re going to decide — you want me, an unelected person, to get to decide what the President of the United States or the Republican nominee or whomever gets to say? I don’t think we want that, I don’t want that”. And it’s just, they make it seem so easy, and it’s like, wait a second, this is the same writer who wrote The American President, and wrote a whole big soliloquy about the importance of the First Amendment, and now you’re wanting a private company to enact these different rules? It’s just really frustrating.
At the end of the day, it’s political, it’s political. They are jawboning, they’re working the ref, both sides are, because they realize how important these platforms are for them to get their message out and so they realize that if they try to exert pressure, they might be able to get more favorable views or something like that.
Yeah. When I say it’s partisan, I don’t mean that the right has been a shining example of protecting the First Amendment, or the Trump Administration, it’s more a matter of, when I state that, that’s what I get accused of, and it’s kind of annoying, we need some sort of universal value here.
It’s funny you mentioned the movie and your reaction to this, I remember I was at some conference, and this was in my — significantly more critical of tech, I’ve become more — not a shill, maybe some would say that, but more appreciative of actually, the alternatives are a lot tougher than you think — and I remember I was at this conference, and they asked me to be there as someone who knew about tech, it wasn’t a tech conference, but this session was tech-oriented. And I was there with someone who was very big in the trust and safety space, and pretty aggressive in that regard, to the extent it made me fairly uncomfortable — like, what’s the line between what you’re advocating for and censorship?
This group was so bizarrely anti-Facebook, so off the reservation about what they were talking about, that her and I spent the whole hour defending Facebook, she walked out and was like, “I never thought in a million years I’d spend an hour defending Facebook”. But it’s almost like, when you mention watching the movie after reading this book, it’s like, “Okay, in Facebook, very frustrating, leave Facebook — it was tough, I feel like my work’s done”, and then the more you go out in the world, it’s like, “Look guys, it’s a lot more complicated than you realize it might be”.
KH: This is one of the reasons that when I went out on my own, I saw a space for somebody with a more nuanced perspective from the center-right to be talking about some of these issues, in a world where people don’t want nuance, but I keep trying to inject it there anyways, because so many people have never been given a window into what this looks like.
And I’m like, “Okay, you don’t like the decisions we made, here’s the trade-offs, what would you do?”, and then they’re like, “Well no, you’re the smart one, figure it out” — you just told me you didn’t like the decision I made! But they don’t want to grab the third rail, because they know how politically fraught it is and so part of the reason I wanted to write the book is, I’m not asking people to change their mind or agree with all of our decisions, but if they could be like, “Huh, that’s a little harder than I thought”, that’s a win for me.
How important is employee pressure to navigating these things? How much does it matter that people were super proud to be working for Facebook after 2012, and after 2016 they’re scrubbing their LinkedIn profiles?
KH: A little bit. But at the end of it — there’s the people working at the company but not on those topics, and then the people working at the company who are actually working on civic and elections and politics.
At the end of the day, it all depended on what Mark wanted and what he wanted to do, and sometimes employee pressure could play a little bit of a role in that, but oftentimes it didn’t on the really big things, because Mark would just make whatever call he wanted to make, and then we had to execute on it.
What are you doing now? How does this tie into your experiences — building the Internet for political campaigns, bringing Meta to Washington, D.C.? What is that, and how do you think about the rest of your life?
KH: It’s very much a portfolio life. I love being a consultant and working for myself. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go back into full-time somewhere — never say never. I do a lot of consulting — initially it was a lot with think tanks here in D.C., explaining, “Here’s how Facebook works, so if you’re trying to influence what these companies think, here’s how you need to frame it”, etc. Now it’s a lot with tech companies, and what their policies are around elections, politics, content moderation overall. A lot on AI at the moment.
And is that actually giving policy recommendations, or, “This is how your policy is going to be interpreted”?
KH: Both. I’ve had newer companies come to me and they’re like, “All right, tell us what decision we need to make so that nobody yells at us”, and I’m like, “That’s not an option”, from what we’ve been talking about. The question is what your risk tolerance is, “Where are you willing to get some criticism versus not?”, and trying to help them figure out what those pathways are, and how it’s going to be politically received in D.C. or elsewhere in the United States, or also around the world, and what that might look like.
Right now I’m doing a lot of work — I do a lot of work with tech companies, but a lot right now and so if somebody goes to even if it’s Google Search, but also ChatGPT or Claude or something, and they put in a prompt about everything from “Where?”, “When?”, and “How?” to vote, or what does this candidate think about this issue, etc., how should the models respond, and where are they pulling from authoritative information or not? And what does that look like?
And is it better — in broad strokes, I think Anthropic is sort of the more ideological, “This is the way it’s going to be”, company, and OpenAI seems to be more reactive, sort of finger in the wind. Which one works better, just in general?
KH: You mean for the election stuff on the questions, or just kind of overall?
Just in general.
KH: OpenAI reminds me a lot of Facebook, because there are a lot of former Facebookers in it, so the cultures have very much mirrored that. I still think — I don’t know yet. It’ll be very interesting to see Anthropic, despite, yes, a very principled stance, but have also been having to still figure out how to work with the Administration, because they’ve realized the downside of, okay, you can have values, but then they’re going to shut you down, and that lets you do as much stuff as you want. So you kind of got to dance with the devil a little bit and I think Anthropic is figuring that out in real time.
And that’s maybe the ultimate summary here, and why you shouldn’t be taking too much responsibility. It turns out this is really hard! If you have an administration that is telling you it’s this way or the highway, you still need to survive, you still need to be an ongoing entity.
KH: You need to survive. These are businesses, and even if it might annoy me sometimes at how they’re responding to it, I’ve told a lot of people, “Yeah they’re going to go to the Inauguration in ’25”, and they’re going to do this stuff, because they’re making a calculation that over the next four years is going to be so crucial to AI that, if a Democrat comes in in ’29, they’ll figure that out in ’29. But right now they’ve got to deal with Trump for four years, so they better figure out how to work with them, because you sure as heck don’t want to be on the outside of all that, because that could be really detrimental to your business.
If it was a Democratic president, would there be like, “Yeah, you’ve got to deal with it, dance with the devil, because you’ll deal with it in 2030?”, or does this tend to be a one-way thing?
KH: Well, you saw that with Biden. You saw it with Biden, and like, Musk got mad when they weren’t included in some of the Biden stuff. But the companies have to deal with, no matter what Administration is in power, both in the executive and also in Congress and so, going back to what we were talking about, all of these companies have Democrats and Republicans — they are hired for that background they have, so they have to maintain the relationships with them, because if you’ve been in D.C. long enough, you know that the pendulum continues to swing so you can’t go all in on one party too much, because then that might hurt you when that inevitably changes.
Yeah. Well, Katie Harbath, congratulations on writing a book. I think you should feel less guilty.
KH: Thank you, I appreciate that.
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