About TechPlatform
TechPlatform is a public-interest project that maps where progressive candidates have produced substantive work on technology policy, across five key stance categories:
AI Rollout
- Data center expansion: moratoriums; siting & zoning; tax incentives without conditions; grid strain & ratepayer cost-shifting; noise & light pollution near residential areas.
- Energy & water: electricity consumption as % of grid; water use for cooling; coal/gas re-openings to power AI; conflict with renewable transition timelines.
- AI training data & copyright: consent & compensation for scraped creative work; opt-in vs. opt-out regimes; news publishers; artists; musicians; whether AI training counts as fair use.
- Data labeling & ghost work: wage theft & poverty wages for Mechanical Turk / Remotasks / Scale AI workers; trauma exposure for content moderators; outsourcing to the Global South without labor protections.
- AI liability & oversight: federal AI oversight body; mandatory impact assessments; liability for AI-caused harm; facial recognition bans; AI in hiring, housing, credit decisions.
- Semiconductor & industrial policy: CHIPS Act accountability; domestic fab conditions; worker standards at new fabs; Taiwan Strait supply chain risk; export controls.
Worker Rights
- Algorithmic management: warehouse productivity quotas; driver tracking; surveillance scoring; bossware in remote work.
- Gig & platform work: employee vs. contractor classification; minimum pay floors; benefits portability; deactivation due process.
- Automation & displacement: retraining funding; bargaining rights when AI replaces work; severance and transition standards.
- Tech labor organizing: protections for tech workers unionizing; retaliation against whistleblowers; non-compete and NDA reform.
Surveillance & Privacy
- Government surveillance: Section 702 reform; warrantless data purchases from brokers; ICE / DHS data pipelines; police facial recognition.
- Commercial data brokers: location data sales; health and reproductive data; sale of data to law enforcement without warrants.
- Federal privacy law: comprehensive consumer privacy baseline; private right of action; preemption of stronger state laws.
- Encryption & device access: client-side scanning; backdoor mandates; right-to-repair as a security posture.
Platform Power
- Antitrust & structural separation: breakups of Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple; self-preferencing bans; interoperability mandates.
- Algorithmic amplification: Section 230 reform; transparency requirements; recommender system audits; teen-safety design rules.
- App store & payment rails: sideloading; third-party payments; developer pricing power.
- Cloud concentration: AWS / Azure / GCP procurement leverage; resiliency mandates; critical-infrastructure dependency.
Predatory FinTech
- Crypto consumer protection: stablecoin reserves & disclosures; fraud and rug-pull liability; SEC vs. CFTC jurisdiction; campaign money from crypto-aligned PACs.
- Buy-now-pay-later & payday-style lending: APR transparency; income-driven affordability checks; debt trap protections.
- Algorithmic credit & insurance: bias audits; adverse-action explainability; redlining via proxy variables.
- Embedded finance: Cash App / Venmo / Apple Pay consumer protections; chargeback rights; fraud reimbursement parity with banks.
Future versions will track the corporate tech money flowing to their opponents.
How we describe positions
Under the hood, every topic has two scores: a depth score (how much the candidate has engaged, from silence to authored legislation) and an alignment score (how progressive the actual position is). We don't show those numbers prominently because a single 0–10 grade misreads the landscape: most candidates are absent on tech, not opposed. Instead each topic gets a qualitative bucket:
- Comprehensive & AlignedAuthored legislation or signature campaign issue, strongly progressive
- Developed PositionClear platform plank or sustained advocacy
- On RecordHas stated a view but no detailed framework
- Mostly QuietBrief mention or weak inference only
- SilentNo public position found
- Engaged, MisalignedSubstantive engagement in a non-progressive direction (e.g. crypto-industry-friendly)
Each candidate page lists the underlying depth and alignment numbers (and the source quote) inside the "Why this rating" disclosure, for transparency.
Reference Candidates / Representatives
We include a small set of reference candidates, included as benchmarks for TechPlatform's methodology. Today that includes:
- Alex Bores: not broadly progressive, but authored the NY RAISE Act, a substantive frontier-AI safety law. Useful as a yardstick for AI policy depth.
- Bernie Sanders: federal-level reference for progressive framing on AI, labor automation, and antitrust.
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: reference for data-center moratorium and surveillance legislation.
- Ro Khanna: Silicon Valley-adjacent reference for tech worker rights, AI policy, and antitrust framing.
Source labels
For each position, we tag where the signal came from:
- stated: explicit on the candidate's official campaign site.
- platform: explicit public position outside the campaign site (op-eds, interviews, speeches, social).
- record: derived from legislative or voting record.
- inferred: extrapolated from adjacent positions (de-weighted in the analysis).
- unknown: no signal in the sources we gathered.
Funding data
Funding amounts are currently placeholder estimates pending integration with the FEC's public API. Those rows are tagged (est.).