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, 8/23/18, Buzz Feed
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.
Kevin Collier is a
cybersecurity correspondent for Buzz Feed News and is based in New York.
Comments
So, the Liberal Social
Media Moguls and the FBI will make sure the November Election isn’t
hacked…..perfect.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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