He Helped Build Facebook Messenger. Now He’s Building an Army of Voters
He started listening to a lot of nonfiction audiobooks about inequality, devouring a veritable syllabus of influential progressive texts: The New Jim Crow, Evicted, Give Us the Ballot, Saving Capitalism, and so on. He became fixated on how unfair modern American life was—how few people had access to the kind of privilege, for example, that allowed someone like him to take time off from work without having to worry about money.
Eventually, he explained, he landed on political campaigns and organizing technology, where “the demands and goals are similar to Messenger: How do I bring my friends onto this?” Last fall he joined Mobilize America, the leading events platform for Democratic and progressive campaigns. Now instead of trying to maximize how much time users spend on Facebook, his job is to make it easier for volunteers to help Democrats win elections on the digital side—which, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, is going to be the only side that matters for a while.
“Platforms like Facebook are built to get you to engage on Facebook; they're not built to get you into the offline world, doing things for a particular organization.”
“Your traditional Democratic voters are people who go to protests and volunteer, whereas your Republican voters are more likely to look for the organization and leadership of a candidate or campaign,” he says. “There aren't as many nonprofits driving organizing and things like that on the right.”
See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/former-facebook-engineer-mobilize-democrats-election-2020/