Report: Twitter and Facebook Set Private Meeting to Discuss Midterm Election Strategy

Representatives from numerous U.S. big tech companies are meeting in private to discuss the strategies they will use to “counter information operations”

The disclosure of the meeting came in a Buzz Feed News report on Friday, titled ‘Tech Companies Are Gathering For A Secret Meeting To Prepare A 2018 Election Strategy.’ It detailed an email by Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, inviting employees from a dozen companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Snapchat, to gather at Twitter’s headquarters in downtown 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,” Gleicher wrote.

The meeting, scheduled for Agust 24, is set to contain 3 themes: each company will present the work they’ve been doing to “counter information operations”; discussion on the problems each company is currently facing; and a talk about whether such a meeting should become a regular occurrence, Buzz Feed News notes.

A similar meeting happened between tech giants in may at Facebook headquarters. They discussed similar topics alongside two US government representatives, Department of Homeland Security Under Secretary Chris Krebs and Mike Burham from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force.

Foreign Influence Task Force is a bureau of the FBI department comprised of different divisions, including counterintelligence, cyber and criminal investigative elements. It was set up under Trump’s handpicked FBI director Christopher Wray.

The private meeting comes at an interesting time, as conservative figures are being swept up by new big tech policies which enforce rules against certain types of speech and behavior.

Earlier this month Radio Host and Infowars.com founder Alex Jones’ was deplatformed by numbers big tech companies including YouTube, Facebook, Apple and Spotify. This all happened within a 12-hour span.

These big tech private meetups could add to the suspicion that the gang up on Jones was in fact coordinated.

There was also a purge of Libertarian and anti-war voices such as Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute and Editor of Antiwar.com, Scott Horton.

Social giants and other big tech companies went in front of Congress in July for a hearing over claims that social media platforms and tech companies are biased against conservative viewpoints.

With all of this, might you might want to note what Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said at the beginning of the week.