Stratechery: Facebook's former elections chief on her decade running politics at the company

Facebook's political work, described from inside the company

"An Interview with Katie Harbath About Disrupting Politics at Facebook" — Stratechery

1. The guest ran the work the interview looks back on. Harbath joined Facebook in 2011, after a decade in Republican politics, and stayed for the next ten years, eventually leading the teams that handled the company's relationships with politicians and election officials around the world. 3 She had been the Republican National Committee's chief digital strategist, and she left Facebook in March 2021. She now runs Anchor Change, a consultancy that advises companies, civil-society groups and policymakers on technology and democracy. 4 The book is Disrupting Politics: A Front Row Seat to the Collision of Technology and Democracy, published October 6 by Indigo River Publishing, 286 pages, distributed by Simon & Schuster. 5
2. What the book covers, in the specifics she has given on the record. The publisher's own contents list runs from the early digital campaign years through the 2016 election and its aftermath, Cambridge Analytica, the congressional hearings, and the dismantling of the platform integrity teams. 6 In interviews around publication she has been concrete about the tradeoffs. The lesson she draws first is about measurement: once a campaign stunt could be counted, she says, the focus moved to more clicks and attention, and nobody was thinking about where that pressure would push politics over time. The change she names first is political ad transparency, where she would go back and write rules for a product that reached voters at broadcast scale with none attached. On Cambridge Analytica she describes the response as a structural problem: one person at Facebook investigated app complaints at a company that then had about 1.5 billion users and 12,000 staff. 4
3. The argument that travels beyond Facebook is about AI. Harbath's stated reason for writing the book now is that the AI moment is history's rhyme to the social-media era, and that the people navigating it deserve the institutional memory. 6 She has made the comparison explicit in public, and the pattern she describes is the one she lived through: founders who speak about good intentions while saying they do not know what will happen, and little appetite anywhere for being the party that writes the guardrails. Her summary of what the decade taught her is that "good intentions are not safeguards, and scale is not a strategy." 4 She now works with companies and policymakers on exactly that question, which is where this interview reaches a product team's own decisions.

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