Tech and Democracy Profile: Amy Larsen
All Tech Is Human’s Tech & Democracy report addresses key issues and best practices in the field, and highlights a diverse range of individuals working in the field (across civil society, government, industry, academia, and entrepreneurship). Similar to all of our reports, this is assembled by a large global working groups across multiple disciplines, backgrounds, and perspectives.
As part of the Tech & Democracy report our team interviewed more than 40 people working to create a brighter tech future. This week, we’ll be highlighting select interviews.
Today, we hear from Director of Strategy and Business Management, Microsoft's Democracy Forward Initiative Amy Larsen. To read more profile interviews, click below to download the Tech & Democracy report now.
Q: What are the key challenges for democracy that technology can ameliorate?
The best version of what technology can do to ameliorate key challenges to democracy is to develop innovative ways to nurture the foundations of democracy, as well as to mitigate the harms to fundamental rights that technologies can create. This might mean carving out new pathways for responsible and respectful connection, collaboration, and civic engagement among people, between citizens and their governments, and between companies and society. For instance, in connection with the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, our Democracy Forward team led security coordination efforts across the company, and partnered with Bing, Xbox, Microsoft Start, and Xandr to register over 50,000 new voters in the 2022 U.S. midterm election cycle. We also ran LinkedIn ads that inspired over 800 people to sign up as poll workers across the United States.
Microsoft has also tried to help minimize harms through projects and partnerships led by our Democracy Forward, Digital Safety, Responsible AI, Human Rights, Digital Diplomacy, Accessibility, Sustainability, Digital Threat Analysis, Justice Reform Initiative, and Airband teams, to name just a few. Even in a world of perfect multi-stakeholder collaboration, it’s hard to imagine not needing government, industry, and citizen engagement in managing the downsides and maximizing the benefits of technology to democracy.
Q: There has been a lot of discussion around increasing multi-stakeholder collaboration to reduce some of the issues related to tech and democracy. In your opinion, how can we increase multi-stakeholder collaborations?
Over the last decade, we’ve seen digital transformation increase in speed and scope across industries and sectors. This trend is likely to accelerate, making it essential for government, tech, and business leaders to consider both how to maximize the upsides presented by advances in technology and how to minimize the harms that might arise if technological developments are set loose without forethought and planning. Democracy has been a prime candidate for digital transformation as well, leading to the potential for improvements in government’s ability to serve constituents, and the empowerment of citizens to connect, communicate, and participate in dialogue and civic activities more easily than ever before. As the threat landscape continues to evolve, and threat actors become more sophisticated at exacerbating divisions within our societies and exploiting vulnerabilities introduced by new technologies, it is even more important that tech companies shine a light on bad actor activity, and try to both disrupt it where we can, and mitigate its impacts on customers and citizens.
A better tech future thus includes the safeguarding of fundamental rights in the digital age, as well as respectful coexistence in digital and non-virtual spaces, as supported and promoted by technology. We begin with the recognition that as a tech company, Microsoft has an important role to play in this era of profound digital disruption and transformation. We take this responsibility seriously and are deeply committed to making a positive impact at the intersection of democracy, fundamental rights, and technology.
Q: Looking five years into the future, how would you hope the conditions have changed related to tech and democracy?
At Microsoft, we are deeply committed to facilitating the good, and minimizing the downsides to advances in technology. In particular, the mission of our Democracy Forward team at Microsoft is to preserve, protect, and advance the fundamentals of democracy by promoting a healthy information ecosystem, safeguarding open and secure democratic processes, and advocating for corporate civic responsibility.
Over the past year, the devastating war in Ukraine has challenged companies, governments, and citizens alike to determine how best to respond. Since the war began, Microsoft has provided over $400 million in financial and technical aid to Ukraine. After observing the first Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine from Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington the day before Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border on February 24, Microsoft has worked to defend key Ukrainian infrastructure. Initially, Microsoft and others helped evacuate the Ukrainian government’s data to the cloud when the war broke out Since then, Microsoft has helped detect and disrupt cyberattacks and cyber influence operations perpetrated against Ukraine. Microsoft has also supported people, communities, and humanitarian organizations in Ukraine and neighboring countries, including providing relief assistance for refugees and children, offering grants to nonprofits helping connect displaced people with job training resources, and partnering with organizations like the Clooney Foundation to hold Russia accountable for war crimes in Ukraine. Microsoft has also supported nonprofits and humanitarian organizations in neighboring countries and is proud to continue to support, defend, and empower the Ukrainian people.
Our Democracy Forward team, which works to protect journalists and journalism in the U.S. and abroad, develops media literacy programs and trainings, and partners with teams across the company to detect and disrupt nation state cyber influence operations. The team also recently led the company-wide adoption of four information integrity principles. First, Microsoft is committed to respecting freedom of expression and upholding our customers’ ability to create, publish, and search for information via our platforms, products, and services. Second, we proactively work to prevent our platforms and products from being used to amplify foreign cyber influence sites and content. Third, we do not willfully profit from foreign cyber influence content or actors. And finally, we prioritize surfacing content to counter foreign cyber influence operations by utilizing internal and trusted third-party data in our products. As we advance rapidly toward a future already being built by generative artificial intelligence tools like DALL-E and ChatGPT, and in which Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella anticipates that 10% of content will be generated by AI by 2025, it will remain essential for stakeholders to clarify the values and principles for which they stand. This includes tech companies, governments, and citizens, all of whom will be forced to wrestle with increasingly complex questions in the virtual world, especially when it comes to the information space. Truth, trust, decency, and kindness must remain core values – among citizens, industry, and government – in the next five years and beyond.