When Katie Harbath (BA, Journalism ’03) speaks to groups of undergraduates, there is one nugget that always makes them go hmmmmm: Nearly every job she has ever had didn’t exist before she had it.
“I worked 10 years at a company that didn’t exist the day I graduated from UW,” says Harbath. “My entire career has been coming up with new jobs.”
Harbath is now the founder and CEO of Anchor Change, a consulting business and e-newsletter she launched in 2021 that helps clients in the political and nonprofit world understand social media platforms. But Harbath is perhaps better known for her previous job as the former public-policy director at Facebook, helping shape the rise of the social media giant in the political arena—and then watching its reputation suffer as a purveyor of distrust and disinformation.
As a journalism undergrad at UW, Harbath was one of the first students to dabble in the digital world in Professor of Journalism Katy Culver’s Mass Media Practices class.
“She made me webmaster that year, and she always loves telling this story, because I hated it,” recalls Harbath with a laugh. “I was like, ‘I’m going to be a print journalist. This digital stuff, like what are you making me do all that stuff for?’ And now that’s been my career.”
I was like, ‘I’m going to be a print journalist. This digital stuff, like what are you making me do all that stuff for?’ And now that’s been my career.
A gig handling digital roles on campaigns for the Republican National Committee was her ticket into Facebook. The social media company had launched the concept of business “pages” in late 2007, and politicians were just beginning to use them to inform and interact with their constituencies. After the 2010 election cycle, Facebook reached out to Harbath and hired her to work with Republican politicians.
“We wanted 2016 to be known as the Facebook election,” says Harbath. “We wanted it to be the place where people were getting their news and information, where candidates were directly talking to voters, all this stuff that we thought was the ideal of how these platforms would work.”
2016 was indeed the Facebook election, but not, Harbath says, in the way she and her employer had intended.
Harbath points to May 9, 2016—the day of the Philippines election and when the story broke that a former Facebook contractor had accused the company of rigging its trending topics section to suppress conservative content—as the start of Facebook’s slide. With actors both foreign and local flooding the platform with misinformation, Facebook became the face of everything that was wrong with social media. As the crises kept coming, Harbath, as one of the company’s public spokespeople, bore much of the internal and external criticism.
“It’s not as simple as what some people have said, that for Facebook it was safety over profit,” says Harbath. “The conversations I was in were about free expression versus preventing harm. And those are much harder decisions and trade-offs.”
Facebook removed Harbath from elections-related work in late-2019. A little over a year later, the January 6 attack on the Capitol happened.
“All of a sudden, I saw the two entities that I’ve worked for my entire life, the Republican Party and Facebook, both look dramatically different from when I first started working with them,” says Harbath. She left the company in March 2021.
Launching Anchor Change has expanded her reach and cemented her brand.
She has connected with partners eager to leverage her insider insights, such as the Bipartisan Policy Center (a Washington, D.C. think tank) and the Integrity Institute.
“I’m seen as somebody reporters and policymakers can rely on,” she says.
Harbath still makes it back to Wisconsin. She’s on the board of Katy Culver’s Center for Journalism Ethics and spent last June in Eagle River at her parents’ cabin.
But it’s politics and the promise of technology and social media that fuels her soul.
“I love being in the middle of these fascinating, tough questions,” says Harbath. “There’s nowhere I’d rather be than trying to figure out this really hard stuff.”
