Tech giants hold a secret meeting ahead of the US 2018 midterms

The
meeting will take place at Twitter HQ in San
Francisco.
Reuters

• Silicon Valley giants are holding a private meeting on
  Friday to discuss how to tackle misinformation ahead of the
  2018 midterm elections in November.
• Buzzfeed news first reported on the meeting after
  obtaining an email sent by Facebook’s head of cybersecurity
  policy inviting a dozen companies to meet at Twitter’s
  headquarters.
• The companies will present the work they’ve done to
  counter misinformation campaigns and discuss the problems they
  each face.

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Silicon Valley giants including Facebook, Twitter, Google,
Microsoft, and Snap will hold a private meeting on Friday to
discuss the problem of misinformation ahead of the US midterm
elections in November.

The meeting was
first reported by BuzzFeed, which obtained an email sent by
Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy Nathaniel Gleicher. In
the email, he invited representatives from 12 companies to meet
at Twitter HQ in San Francisco.

“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,” wrote Gleicher.

According to Gleicher’s email, the meeting will have a three-part
agenda. Each company will present the work they’ve done to combat
misinformation, then the companies as a whole will discuss the
particular problems they each face, and finally, they will decide
whether they should hold the meeting on a regular basis.

Eight tech giants
held a similar meeting in May of this year, with US
government representatives present. Christopher Krebs, an
undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security and Mike
Burham from the FBI’s “foreign influence” taskforce, provided the
companies with scant information, reportedly leaving them
frustrated.

Foreign influence campaigns on social media ahead of the midterms
have been in the spotlight in recent weeks. At the end of July,

Facebook announced it had it had banned 32 pages after it
uncovered a coordinated effort to influence US politics. It said
it was not sure of the provenance of the operation, but that it
bore similarities to previous Russian disinformation campaigns.

Microsoft also recently announced it had
detected Russian hacking attempts targeted at Republicans,
just weeks after it came out that Russian hackers had tried to

infiltrate the systems of Democratic Senator Claire
McCaskill.

Business Insider has contacted Facebook, Twitter, Google,
Microsoft, and Snap for comment.

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