What Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis’s publicity stunt is not is an unprecedented intervention into the political process by the private tech industry.
Give me a break.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to launch his 2024 bid on Twitter alongside Elon Musk is either a masterstroke or another example of how the governor’s campaign has siloed itself with unrepresentative denizens of the virtual world. I was initially skeptical of DeSantis’s decision to affiliate himself with one of the world’s most polarizing over-sharers. It’s a decision that may yet complicate DeSantis’s campaign down the line. But the coverage his unconventional launch has garnered since the announcement eclipses even that which should accompany the entrance of Donald Trump’s most viable opponent into the GOP primary race.
Whatever else DeSantis’s decision is, it’s a bold and unconventional move. What Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis’s publicity stunt is not, however, is an unprecedented intervention into the political process by the private tech industry. On that point, NBC News reporters Dasha Burns and Matt Dixon disagree:
Even if Musk stops short of a full endorsement of DeSantis, aligning with his presidential announcement puts him and the company more squarely into a presidential election than any other tech company before it. Twitter, Facebook and others have launched election hubs and voter registration efforts, but have kept candidates at arm’s length.
That’s a debatable premise, particularly if you were conscious and literate prior to 2009. That’s when the public began to learn the extent of the cooperation between Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and tech entrepreneur Chris Hughes, who, according to a Fast Company exposé, “helped create two of the most successful startups in modern history, Facebook and the Barack Obama campaign.”
“His key tool was My.BarackObama.com, or MyBO for short, a surprisingly intuitive and fun-to-use networking Web site that allowed Obama supporters to create groups, plan events, raise funds, download tools, and connect with one another — not unlike a more focused, activist Facebook,” the report read. Fast Company relates the degree to which Hughes’s work on the campaign and his ties to the tech world “became critically important” to Obama’s electoral successes, according to Obama ’08 campaign manager David Plouffe.
But the 2008 operation would pale in comparison to 2012. Washington Post reporter Dan Balz’s thorough breakdown of the blurred lines between the tech industry and Obama’s political operation — also after the fact, in 2013 — is instructive. “Early in 2011, some Obama operatives visited Facebook, where executives were encouraging them to spend some of the campaign’s advertising money with the company,” his report noted. It wasn’t just the ad space Facebook owned but its proprietary technology that boosted Obama’s reelection efforts:
If a person signed on to Dashboard through his or her Facebook account, the campaign could, with permission, gain access to that person’s Facebook friends. The Obama team called this “targeted sharing.” It knew from other research that people who pay less attention to politics are more likely to listen to a message from a friend than from someone in the campaign. The team could supply people with information about their friends based on data it had independently gathered. . . . Instead of asking someone to send a message to all of his or her Facebook friends, the campaign could present a handpicked list of the three or four or five people it believed would most benefit from personal encouragement.
Balz’s profile cites “Google’s Eric Schmidt, who offered advice to the campaign,” praising the Obama 2012 team’s “integration of technology and old-fashioned organizing,” which would have been less successful absent the assistance of some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names.
Facebook’s integration with Obama’s political operation eventually became something of a political scandal, but only when Donald Trump’s consultants similarly accessed user data on social-media platforms, albeit in distinct ways and for discreet purposes. Whereas the Obama campaign’s Facebook widget asked users permission to donate, learn voting requirements, and identify persuadable neighbors to canvas on the candidate’s behalf, users who accessed an app controlled by Cambridge Analytica were not informed that their data would be supplied to the Trump campaign.
That’s a distinction with a difference. The Trump campaign’s data-mining and microtargeting efforts were, however, unremarkable because Obama’s example made them unremarkable. “We had consent,” Obama 2012 online organizing director Betsy Hoover told NPR. “It was within Facebook’s terms of service, and we were very minimalist with how we used that data.” Facebook altered its terms of service during Obama’s second term in office to prevent the sort of data sharing from which the president’s campaign benefited. But at the time, it was all above board.
How does any of this compare with Ron DeSantis’s sit-down with Elon Musk, which is set to be broadcast on Twitter? It doesn’t. But the assertion to the contrary from NBC News’s reporters provides a useful opportunity to remind voters just how tightly wedded Silicon Valley was to Barack Obama’s campaigns. We haven’t seen anything like it since.