Representatives from around a dozen US tech titans are holding a private Friday meeting at Twitter headquarters to coordinate their efforts ahead of the 2018 US midterm elections, reports BuzzFeed News.

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… –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 has a three-part agenda; each company will present their latest efforts to counter “information operations,” then there will be a discussion about problems each company faces; and finally, participants will discuss whether such coordination conclaves should become an annual affair.

Nine of the companies meeting Friday also met in May at Facebook to discuss similar issues along with two US government representatives; Department of Homeland Security Under Secretary Chris Krebs and Mike Burham from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force created last November. The attendees say they were discouraged after the meeting after receiving little input from the G-men.

Red Dawn?

Social media giants – particularly Facebook and Twitter – faced harsh scrutiny from Democratic legislators following the 2016 US election for allowing “fake news” and Russia to rob Hillary Clinton of her turn to be president, or for somehow forcing her to ignore several key states while campaigning.

On the other hand, Facebook VP of advertising, Rob Goldman, admitted in February that “the majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election,” and “I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.” 

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