2024 is the biggest global election year in history. What’s at stake for developers?

Citizens in 76 countries constituting 4.2 billion people including India, the United States, and the European Union are heading to the polls this year, making this the biggest global elections year in history. This landmark year for democracy is happening at a pivotal moment for tech policy, as policymakers consider how to approach AI legislatively while bracing for the potential impact of generative AI on elections. AI is also intertwined with every other hot tech policy topic, including cybersecurity, sustainability, and competition.

While tech policy impacts us all, these elections are particularly relevant to software developers because public policy influences who has the access and opportunity to participate in global code collaboration. In a significant election year for developers, GitHub is considering what is at stake for our users and platform, how we can take responsible action to support free and fair elections, and how developers contribute to resilient democratic processes.

These elections are occurring at an inflection point for AI policy. Policymakers are looking to encourage the immense societal benefits of AI while mitigating potential harms. Their decisions will have a significant impact on burgeoning technologies because they influence the opportunities, resources, and regulations that constrain and enliven innovation. For example, to understand the success of Silicon Valley, one can look at how United States law created conditions for the tech industry to flourish, by, for example, shielding intermediaries from strict liability for user-generated content, while other regulatory regimes impeded innovation. AI-powered developer tools have the potential to democratize access, so that anyone can be a developer, and accelerate productivity, with recent research estimating that generative AI-powered developer tools could boost global GDP by over $1.5 trillion. We have the opportunity to chart a path forward for AI policy that balances opportunity with risk, encouraging mindful inventorship at all levels, from hobbyists and entrepreneurs to large organizations.

It’s clear that we need policies that consider and represent the interests of developers and open source, but this is easier said than done. While open source underpins innovation and economic vitality–with an estimated 96% of codebases containing open source–it is too often misunderstood by policymakers unaware of its benefits and misinformed about its risks. GitHub worked to get the balance right in the European Union’s AI Act and Cyber Resilience Act to protect open source and avoid undue burden on developers, advocating for clear exemptions for open source to avoid chilling innovation. We need developer champions in public office who don’t just understand the value of open source and nuances of software development but are pursuing innovative ideas to support open source sustainability like the Open Technology Fund’s FOSS Sustainability Fund and Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund.

This massive election year represents an opportunity to strengthen policymaker understanding and collaboration with the global developer community. Worldwide efforts to nationalize digital space driven by cybersecurity concerns, competition, and censorship cut people off from mutually beneficial open innovation and the ability to benefit their local communities. We need leaders who want to protect and support the ability for anyone, anywhere to become a software developer and contribute to shared knowledge and advancement in the open. A critical area of influence is the global availability of platforms like GitHub, which is home to over 100 million developers collaborating on code throughout the world. While complying with sanctions we work to keep as much of GitHub available to as many developers as feasible under U.S. sanctions laws, by securing licenses to make public repositories accessible, as much as possible, worldwide.

This significant global election year has challenged us to consider GitHub’s role within the information ecosystem and how we can govern our platform responsibly. Policymakers and journalists are concerned about the impact of deepfakes and other AI-generated disinformation on elections as observed in large democracies like India, where the fears of AI generated information warfare were not entirely realized, but deepfake trolling certainly was, and the United States, where the US Federal Communications Commission banned AI-generated voices in robocalls following troubling deepfakes. While GitHub is not a general purpose social media platform where people virally share deepfakes, or an AI-powered media generating platform, we are a platform where users may research and develop tools to generate or detect synthetic media and want to take responsible action. That’s why we joined the AI Elections Accord, a tech accord to combat the deceptive use of AI in elections. The AI Elections Accord establishes principles for signatories to manage the risks arising from deceptive AI election content. In line with this commitment, GitHub updated our Acceptable Use Policies to address the development of synthetic and manipulated media tools for the creation of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) and disinformation, which seeks to strike a balance between addressing misuses of synthetic media tools while enabling legitimate research on these technologies. If we ban these tools altogether, the research community has no way to evaluate the way they work and offer insights to help prevent their abuse. Through balancing safety and accessibility, platforms can encourage the benefits of open models while safeguarding from potential risks.

Developers are significant stakeholders who build the tools that guide our information ecosystem and have an important role to play in protecting elections. Look at the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), an industry-leading effort to address the prevalence of misleading information through the development of technical standards for certifying the source and history (or provenance) of media content, built with open source components and made available in a public GitHub repository. Or consider the Content Authenticity Initiative, a cross-industry consortium that advocates for the adoption of content credentials based on C2PA standards and provides an open source software development kit (SDK) of tools and libraries that enable developers to create, verify, and display content credentials based on C2PA standards.

Protecting our information ecosystem with content provenance and authenticity initiatives is a collaborative effort underpinned by open source. VotingWorks, the only open source voting system used in United States elections, is working to strengthen public trust in elections through open source code, documentation, and development.

These are just a few examples of the important work that open source developers are doing to support democratic processes. Even the simple act of a developer sharing their work and contributing to the world’s open knowledge base contributes to shared human progress.

Written by

Shelley McKinley

@shellsmck