Daily Report: The Tech Companies That Won on Election Day

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Much of the presidential campaign played out on Twitter over the last year.

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Richard Vogel/Associated Press..

Donald J. Trump emerged as the big winner on Election Day. There were some tech victors, too.

One Silicon Valley start-up, for example, got plenty of attention on Tuesday. The company, VoteCastr, said it could provide real-time voter turnout data that could accurately predict, throughout the day, how many votes the candidates received in each state.

There were hiccups in some of VoteCastr’s projections, Alexandra Alter writes. But if nothing else, the tiny company succeeded in getting onto people’s radar screens.

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Then there was Twitter, the social media service where much of the presidential campaign played out over the last year. (Remember Mr. Trump’s early-morning tweets?) On Election Day, conversations about voting and results immediately took off on Twitter, with hashtags like #ElectionNight and live streaming video about the election, conducted in partnership with BuzzFeed News.

Even as Twitter struggles financially, the activity highlighted the social network’s centrality in big news events. From late September to early this week, a staggering one billion tweets were sent about the election, Mike Isaac and Sydney Ember write.

Yet social media companies could not walk away from this election cycle with their heads held high, John Herrman writes. While Twitter and Facebook were supposed to supplant old media, they grappled with harassment, abuse and fake news across their platforms during the presidential campaigns. It was a sign that even as these tech companies rise up, they are perhaps not yet ready for the responsibilities they are inheriting.

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