Ahead of the 2018 election, Big Tech companies are gathering for a secret meeting to discuss information control tactics.
According to BuzzFeed News, “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.”
An email obtained by BuzzFeed reveals that Facebook’s head of cybersecurity, Nathaniel Gleicher, invited employees from Google, Microsoft, and Snapchat to join him for a meeting at Twitter headquarters 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,” Gleicher wrote in the email.
The email outlines three agenda items to be covered in the meeting: 1.) Efforts implemented to combat fake news; 2.) Problems companies face going forward; 3.) Establishing a precedent for future meetings.
The meeting follows a previous meeting that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg held with various media executives back in May in which he outlined a metric that would rank news organizations based on trustworthiness based on consumer perception.
“We put [that data] into the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we’re going to dial up the intensity of that over time,” Zuckerberg said at the time. “We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground.”
Executives that Zuckerberg reportedly shared this new metric with were from the likes of BuzzFeed News, The Information, Quartz, The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, NBC, Recode, Univision, Barron’s, The Daily Beast, The Economist, HuffPost, Insider, The Atlantic, New York Post, and others.