Snapchat Works to Get Its Left-Leaning Userbase to the Polls in 2020

Snapchat, the messaging and photo-sharing social network popular with young people, is preparing a voter registration drive ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, reports Axios.

According to Statista, more than 87 percent of Snapchat’s users are under the age of 35, putting them in an age demographic that leans heavily towards the Democrat party in its political sympathies.

Via Axios:

Why it matters: The company was able to successfully register 450,000 people through its app during the 2018 midterms. Now, new data shows that 50% of those registered actually went out and casted ballots.

Driving the news: The new data from DemocracyWorks, a nonpartisan, nonprofit that runs civic tech companies like TurboVote and BallotScout, shows that 57% of Snapchat users last cycle that registered on the platform did indeed cast a ballot.

Of those that registered, 57% were between the ages of 18 and 24, a demographic that’s usually shy to visit the voting booths.

Although Snapchat’s voter registration drive will reach both likely Democrat voters and likely Republican voters, the company is no doubt aware that far more of the former group than the latter use its platform.

It’s not the first time that a major tech company has used a get-out-the-vote drive in a manner that seems sure to favor Democrats. In 2016, Google embarked on a project called the “silent donation,” which aimed to get Latino voters to the polls in key swing states like Florida and Nevada. The project was revealed thanks to leaked emails in 2018.

In one of the emails, a senior Google employee admitted that the company was shocked when Latinos backed President Trump in higher-than-anticipated numbers.

“Ultimately, after all was said and done, the Latino community did come out to vote, and completely surprised us…We never anticipated that 29% of Latinos would vote for Trump. No one did. We saw headlines like this about early voter turn out and thought that this was finally the year that the ‘sleeping giant’ had awoken.”