Silicon Valley companies and law enforcement are starting to talk about how to ward off meddling by malicious actors including Russia on social media in the November midterms, an attempt at dialogue and information-sharing that was absent during the 2016 presidential elections.
Facebook[1] quietly convened a meeting last month with representatives from the biggest players in the technology industry along with FBI and Department of Homeland Security officials who are responsible for protecting elections from foreign interference, according to eight people familiar with the discussions. Google[2], Twitter[3], Apple[4], Microsoft[5], Snap[6], and the parent company of Yahoo[7] and AOL[8], Verizon[9] subsidiary Oath, attended, according to four of the people.
The meeting at Facebook's Menlo Park, California, headquarters represents a new overture by the technology industry to develop closer ties to law enforcement to prevent abuse of social platforms. The nation's top intelligence chiefs declared in February that the Kremlin is continuing its effort to disrupt the US political system and to target the midterm elections. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said at the time that operatives plan to use propaganda, false personas, and bots to undermine the upcoming election.
Guy Rosen, a top Facebook security executive, recently told the Washington Post that the social network has not yet found evidence of meddling by the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg-based organization that employed dozens of online trolls to manipulate social media during the 2016 presidential campaign, or by other Russian operations such as the GRU, Russia's military spy agency. "We're constantly looking for more activity," he said. "We're running down a lot of investigations."
Facebook confirmed the meeting...