Supporting Election Officials: What Tech Companies Should be Doing to Safeguard our Information Environment

Partisan extremists and foreign adversaries are determined to undermine Americans’ confidence and promote inflammatory, false information about how elections are run. With easy access to generative artificial intelligence (AI) at their disposal – and zero accountability for social media platforms hosting and promoting deepfake content – these rogue actors are ready to flood the information environment and make it exponentially harder for the average voter to determine fact from fiction.

Election officials across the country are bearing the brunt of this toxic information environment, having to expand their responsibilities into correcting false information and monitoring threats of physical violence. Instead of helping local election officials, social media companies have actively reduced the capacity of these frontline democracy workers to flag mis-, dis-, and malinformation on their platforms. A pending Supreme Court decision will also determine how and if the government requesting such content to be taken down violates the First Amendment.

This event will feature election officials and technology experts to discuss how the information landscape has changed over the past few election cycles, the challenges facing local election officials, and what social media companies can voluntarily do in the short and long term to slow the spread of false narratives.

Panel:

• Jiore Craig: Senior Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD)
• Kim Wyman: Former Washington Secretary of State
• Cisco Aguilar: Nevada Secretary of State

The panel will be moderated by Issue One’s Director of Election Protection Carah Ong Whaley.

Watch the event recording.