Flooding the Gap: How social media companies empowered foreign adversaries during 2024 election cycle

This month, Issue One published a new report, “Flooding the Gap: How Big Tech’s Failures Empowered Foreign Adversaries and Undermined the 2024 U.S. Election,” highlighting how the design and operations of American social media platforms, compounded with partisan attacks on civil society collaborators, empowered foreign adversaries to wage sophisticated information warfare in the 2024 election. The goal is to leverage a broken information ecosystem to divide Americans, undermine our democracy, and threaten our national security. This report analyzes how these vulnerabilities emerged, the strategies foreign adversaries employed, and what Congress must do to ensure that the same mistakes are not repeated in future elections.

• Improving the design of technology platforms to create an information ecosystem that nurtures, rather than undermines, American democracy.
• Increasing research, education, and public reporting on the threat of foreign malign influence operations.
• Restricting our adversaries’ influence on social media and in the political process.
• Holding platforms accountable for disseminating foreign propaganda.

The panel included:

• Jamie Neikrie: Co-author of Issue One’s report and Legislative Manager of Technology Reform at Issue One
• Nora Benavidez: Senior Counsel and Director, Digital Justice and Civil Rights at Free Press
• Ellen Jacobs: Digital Policy Manager for the Institute of Strategic Dialogue
• Liana Keesing (moderator): Campaigns Manager of Technology Reform at Issue One

Watch the event recording.