What does the tech sector think about Kamala Harris? • The Register

Analysis With Joe Biden out of the US Presidential race, his VP Kamala Harris is poised to become the Democratic Party’s nominee, but whether her history with Silicon Valley will help is far less assured.

Having started her political and legal careers in California, Harris has a long history of dealing with the tech industry, and while there has been some initial excitement from leaders like LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Box CEO Aaron Levie, her rise is likely to face some pushback from others.

What might hurt?

During her time as California Attorney General, Harris was responsible for a number of lawsuits filed against major tech companies. She won a $4 million settlement from eBay pertaining to its no-poach staff agreement with Intuit in 2014, and the next year secured a $33 million payout from Comcast for privacy violations.

Harris has also suggested that breaking up Facebook would be on the table had she the power, and the Vice President has expressed support for Biden’s attempts to regulate the AI industry. That won’t go over well with the growing crowd of machine learning enthusiasts who have thrown their weight behind former president Donald Trump’s re-election bid – Trump has promised to kill Biden’s AI executive order if he takes office.

“Just as AI has the potential to do profound good, it also has the potential to cause profound harm,” Harris said in a speech late last year. The veep cited incidents like AI algorithms denying medical coverage, as well as her long-time campaign against online revenge porn as potential harms of the technology.

As a Senator for California – a seat she held for four years before leaving for the vice presidency – Harris was responsible for introducing several tech-related bills, like a proposal for a federal revenge porn law, which failed to pass out of committee.

What might help?

On the flip side, Harris hasn’t explicitly expressed support for repealing Section 230 protections for social media companies, which absolve them of most liability for content posted on their platforms by users. That puts her at odds with both her boss and her opponent for the White House.

A lack of commitment on Section 230 may be tied to her purported close relationship with former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, as revealed by a trove of emails in 2020. The messages suggest Harris viewed the tech industry as someone to partner with, rather than prosecute. Harris has prosecuted the people behind revenge porn websites, for example, but not challenged Big Tech.

Sandberg came out in support of Harris yesterday on Instagram: “Vice President has already made history once — becoming the first Black and South Asian woman to hold her office, and she will do it again in November. She is an accomplished leader, a fierce advocate of abortion rights, and the strongest candidate to lead our country.”

Rather than confronting the sector, Harris told Marie Claire that social media leaders have been “wonderful” to work with. “Many companies really want to lead on this issue [of revenge porn],” Harris told the publication in 2015.

Campaign finance records also indicate Harris has been a frequent target of giving from the tech sector, with lobbyists from Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple all forking over max-dollar donations for her 2020 presidential run.

Harris also has a direct connection to Big Tech in the form of her brother-in-law, Tony West, who currently serves as chief legal officer at Uber. West, who married Harris’s sister Maya in 1998, worked as associate attorney general during the Obama administration.

Whether those connections and willingness to work with the tech industry will be enough to heal the growing rift between Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party is a moot point, however, she’s unlikely to win over any of the hardcore Trump supporters like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel. The latter has been extensively linked to Trump’s VP pick, Senator JD Vance, who worked for a time at Thiel’s Mithril Capital.

Of course, all this supposes Harris earns the Democratic nod. While it’s likely she will, we won’t know for sure until the Democratic National Convention in late August, when the party will pick its candidate for presidency and attempt to rebuild its momentum with less than three months until the election. ®