Executive Summary

This report is the fruit of a bipartisan effort to identify areas of agreement among key stakeholders concerning ethical principles and best practices in the conduct of digital campaigning in the United States. Although many have raised concerns about the potential for digital technologies to weaken or undermine democracy, the voices of digital political practitioners are largely absent from this discussion. To fill this gap, we asked those who work for traditional political campaigns and consultancies, as well as platforms like Facebook and Twitter, what they think about these issues and what ethical standards they believe are required for a well-functioning democratic system. This report summarizes expert views expressed in a series of interviews with these professionals and over the course of a two-day workshop on digital political ethics. From these conversations, four broad ethical principles emerged: prioritizing democratic participation, protecting election integrity, increasing transparency, and ensuring fairness and consistency in the application of rules governing digital advertising. After discussing the areas of agreement and disagreement around these four principles, this report covers a set of recommendations to better align digital campaign practices with shared ethical principles. These recommendations cut across all four ethical principles, focusing on what can and should be done by both platforms and practitioners, and the role that government regulation can play in holding these groups accountable.

Authors

Jessica Baldwin-Philippi is an Associate Professor in Fordham University’s Communication and Media Studies department. Her first book, Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship, investigates the digital strategies and tactics that electoral campaigns adopted in a post-Obama, social media era.

Leticia Bode is a Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor in the Communication, Culture, and Technology master’s program at Georgetown University. She researches the intersection of communication, technology, and political behavior, emphasizing the role communication and information technologies may play in the acquisition, use, effects, and implications of political information and misinformation.

Daniel Kreiss is the Edgar Thomas Cato Distinguished Associate Professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a principal researcher of the UNC Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. Kreiss is the author of Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Adam Sheingate is Professor and Chair of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy