The morning after the 2016 election, Katie Harbath sat at a red light on Constitution Avenue in a daze. She had gotten home around 3 a.m. and fallen asleep on the couch in her clothes, CNN still on. She didn’t know exactly what was coming for Facebook. She knew something was.
That’s where her new book opens. Katie ran Facebook’s global elections work for a decade, through 2016, Cambridge Analytica and the congressional hearings that followed. This week she came back to The Friday Reporter for a second conversation, this time about Disrupting Politics: A Front Row Seat to the Collision of Technology and Democracy, out October 6.
She didn’t hedge on why she wrote it. People know the Zuckerberg and Sandberg version. Almost nobody knows what the people in the trenches lived through day to day. She wanted that on the record, in her words.
Katie and I came up the same way. Campaigns first, an analog world, then a digital one. I was at the RNC when she was, and we all wanted the same thing: a president talking directly to voters online. For fifteen years that was the goal. Then it felt like everything changed overnight.
Washington and Silicon Valley are still two bubbles that bump into each other now and then. These days she’s in DC explaining what a prompt is, the same way she once explained a news feed. Anyone who watched Mark Zuckerberg tell a senator “we sell ads” remembers what that gap costs.
You’d expect someone who lived through that backlash to come out of it cynical about AI. Katie didn’t. Her mantra is panic responsibly: weigh what’s in front of you, make the best call you can and be willing to pivot. Congress probably won’t move before 2029. The states already are. And election officials, from the Secretaries of State to Democracy Works, are sitting down with AI companies right now on how chatbots answer where, when and how to vote. She wishes it had started six months ago. It started.
Every time I get breathless about technology, I hear Katie in my head.
She ended on something bigger than tech companies or Congress. We choose our platforms. We choose what we read and what we share. That sends a signal on its own.
Fifty years from now historians will write about this stretch. Katie made sure her story is in the pile. The rest of us are writing ours every time we hit share.
Preorder Disrupting Politics here: [LINK]
Notable Quotes
“I didn’t want anyone else telling me my story.”
“The best thing you can do is weigh the options in front of you right now. Make the best decision you can, and then be willing to pivot based upon what you learn from that.”
“We can control what content we are consuming, and we can think about what content we are sharing.”
Takeaway
The problem isn’t panic. It’s freezing up. Twenty-five years at the collision of tech and politics taught Katie Harbath to make the call, stay ready to change it and never forget the citizen has a say too.
Watch here —
