Disrupting Politics: A Front Row Seat to the Collision of Technology and Democracy

What happens to democracy when technology moves faster than we can govern it?

For a decade, Katie Harbath led Facebook’s global work on elections — inside the rooms where decisions about 2016, Cambridge Analytica and the dismantling of integrity teams were made, affecting billions of voters.

In this AI Conversations event, drawing on her memoir Disrupting Politics, she takes the audience behind the headlines: how platforms actually make election decisions, why every option can feel like the wrong one, and what the social media era’s hard lessons mean now that AI is reshaping politics again. She will also discuss the outcome of the US Midterms, taking place on Tuesday 3 November.

This event also forms part of the King’s AI at the Ballot Box programme which seeks to bring clarity to the question of how AI will shape the future of democratic elections, bringing together policymakers and academic experts in AI safety, online harms, and electoral integrity.

Meet the Speaker

Katie Harbath is the founder of Anchor Change, a newsletter and consultancy on technology and democracy, and the author of Disrupting Politics: A Front Row Seat to the Collision of Technology and Democracy. Described by Foreign Policy as an “election whisperer to the tech industry,” she spent a decade at Facebook building and leading the global teams that managed elections and civic engagement, after senior digital roles at the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the DCI Group. She serves on the boards of the National Conference on Citizenship, Democracy Works, R Street and the Georgetown Institute of Politics, and is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Disrupting Politics is available now in paperback and e-book from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org and other online retailers — all links at anchorchange.com/disrupting-politics-book. The audiobook follows on November 10.