2020 US election and debates at Twitter
Working through the 2020 US election was one of the most intense but rewarding experiences as a content lead and editor. Twitter’s Curation team worked tirelessly to contextualize the biggest conversations on the platform, providing fact-backed PSAs around voting and realtime content around big events.
Since misinformation was running rampant on the platform, we also played a key civic integrity role by producing content that the policy and legal teams could use to label violative Tweets. I was the lead on call who worked with a Curator to produce the team’s first-ever Moment for a Tweet that involved manipulated media.
I was also the approver of content strategy for the Republican and Democratic 2020 conventions, along with the presidential debates. Below you’ll find a curated look at some of the work the Curation team produced. The West Coast’s timezone naturally overlapped with many of these primetime events. When it came to US elections content I was responsible for or actively involved in:
Ideation, brainstorming and content strategy
Assigning, editing, writing and approving copy
Cross-functional content planning with Marketing, Product, Analytics and Partnerships
Training media partners such as Huffington Post, Vice and CBC
Publishing content
Measuring content engagement
Here you can see an example of a PSA produced by the Curation team over the election. It is one of many that the team produced and featured on a dedicated tab for the elections. As a lead at the time, I was responsible for editing (+1-ing) and approving copy during my timezone before it was sent to the legal team.
Sometimes our team worked on multiple live events at the same time. We worked closely with the partnership team in the US to discover and attach live broadcasts when events were unfolding. The Curation team constantly thought about how to make coverage as fair and impartial as possible: As you can see here we committed to equal coverage of the Republican and Democratic town halls as they unfolded live.
The Curation team used various product levers to meet customers where they were. In this case we sent a geo-notification to California voters so they could get live coverage in their particular state. A memorable “push” alert for me was the one we sent when Joe Biden was projected to be the next president. I sent this P0 push personally to millions — pushing the button on our tooling was a total adrenaline rush.
