Kamala Harris has a long history with Silicon Valley that could help – or hurt • The Register

Analysis After Joe Biden withdrew from the US presidential race, his vice president Kamala Harris is on track to win the Democratic Party nomination, but it is much less certain whether her Silicon Valley background will help her do so.

Harris, who began her political and legal career in California, has a long history of working with the tech industry, and while there was some initial enthusiasm from leaders like the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman and CEO Box Aaron Leviher promotion will likely be met with resistance from others.

What could hurt?

While serving as California attorney general, Harris led a series of lawsuits against major tech companies, winning a $4 million settlement from eBay over an employee non-poaching agreement with Intuit in 2014, and the following year securing $33 million in damages from Comcast for privacy violations.

Harris also suggested that breaking up Facebook would be on the table if she had the power, and the vice president has expressed support for Biden’s attempts to regulate the AI ​​industry. That won’t sit well with a growing group of machine learning enthusiasts who threw their weight behind former President Donald Trump’s reelection 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 do profound harm,” Harris said in a speech late last year. The vice president cited incidents such as AI algorithms refusing to cover medical expenses and her long-running campaign against online revenge porn as potential harms from the technology.

As a California senator — a position she held for four years before moving to vice president — Harris was responsible for introducing several tech-related bills, including a federal revenge porn bill that failed to advance out of committee.

What can help?

Harris, on the other hand, has not explicitly expressed support for repealing Section 230 protections for social media companies, which exempt them from most liability for content users post on their platforms. That puts her at odds with both her boss and her opponent in the race for the White House.

The lack of involvement in Section 230 may be related to her alleged close relationship with former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, as revealed in multiple emails in 2020. The messages suggest Harris viewed the tech industry as someone to partner with, not someone to prosecute. Harris went after those behind revenge porn sites, for example, but she did not challenge Big Tech.

Sandberg endorsed Harris on Instagram yesterday: “The Vice President has already made history by becoming the first Black and South Asian woman to hold the office, and she will do so again in November. She is a gifted leader, a staunch supporter of abortion rights, and the strongest candidate to lead our country.”

Rather than confront the sector, Harris told Marie Claire that working with social media leaders has been “wonderful.” “A lot of companies really want to lead on this (revenge porn) issue,” Harris told the publication in 2015.

Campaign finance records also show that Harris has been a frequent target of donations from the tech sector: lobbyists from Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple all gave her maximum donations to the 2020 presidential campaign.

Harris also has direct ties to Big Tech through her brother-in-law, Tony West, who currently serves as Uber’s general counsel. West, who married Harris’ sister, Maya, in 1998, served as deputy attorney general in the Obama administration.

Whether those ties and willingness to work with the tech industry will be enough to ease the growing conflict between Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party is a matter of debate, but it’s unlikely to sway any of Trump’s staunchest supporters, such as Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, who has been widely linked to Trump’s vice presidential nominee, Sen. J.D. Vance, who worked for a time at Thiel’s Mithril Capital.

Of course, all of this assumes Harris wins the Democratic nomination. While that’s likely, we won’t know for sure until the Democratic National Convention in late August, when the party will choose its presidential candidate and try to rebuild momentum with less than three months to go before the election. ®