Tech Companies Are Gathering For A Secret Meeting To Prepare A 2018 Election Strategy
Tech Companies Are Gathering For A Secret Meeting To
Prepare A 2018 Election Strategy
Reps from up to a dozen of the US's biggest tech
companies plan to meet in San Francisco to discuss efforts to counter
manipulation of their platforms.
By Kevin Collier BuzzFeed News Reporter August 23, 2018,
at 10:35 p.m. ET
Representatives from a host of the biggest US tech
companies, including Facebook and Twitter, have scheduled a private meeting for
Friday to share their tactics in preparation for the 2018 midterm elections.
Last week, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy,
Nathaniel Gleicher, invited employees from a dozen companies, including Google,
Microsoft, and Snapchat, to gather at Twitter’s headquarters in downtown San
Francisco, according to an email obtained by BuzzFeed News.
“As I’ve mentioned to several of you over the last few
weeks, we have been looking to schedule a follow-on discussion to our industry
conversation about information operations, election protection, and the work we
are all doing to tackle these challenges,” Gleicher wrote.
The meeting, the Facebook official wrote, will have a
three-part agenda: each company will present the work they’ve been doing to
counter information operations; there will be a discussion period for problems
each company faces; and a talk about whether such a meeting should become a
regular occurrence.
In May, nine of those companies met at Facebook to
discuss similar problems, alongside two US government representatives,
Department of Homeland Security Under Secretary Chris Krebs and Mike Burham
from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, created in November. Attendees
left the meeting discouraged that they received little information from the
government.
Tech companies, Facebook and Twitter in particular, have
faced intense scrutiny for how slowly they initially reacted to reports that
foreign intelligence and affiliated operations used their platforms to
manipulate users ahead of the 2016 election, leading to drops in user
confidence and a threat of regulation from lawmakers.
In February, special counsel Robert Mueller’s office
charged 13 people affiliated with Russia’s Internet Research Agency — a “troll
factory” where employees created personas across multiple platforms — with
breaking laws in order to influence American voters. Since then, Facebook,
Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and YouTube have each had at least one public purge of
accounts believed to be foreign influence operations.
The meeting highlights tech companies’ recent efforts to
be more proactive with governments’ use of their sites to achieve political
goals. Several companies have announced operations this week where they
partnered with other organizations to address such problems.
On Tuesday, Microsoft announced that it had, for the 12th
time since 2016, legally acquired control of a handful of web domains
registered by Russian military intelligence for phishing operations, then shut
them down. The next day, after receiving a tip from the threat intelligence
company FireEye, Facebook and Twitter announced they had taken down a network
of fake news sites and spoofed users meant to create sympathy for the Iranian
government’s worldview. Google made a similar announcement about YouTube on
Thursday.
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