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Tech Companies Are Gathering For A Secret Meeting To Prepare A 2018 Election Strategy

Reps from up to a dozen of the US's biggest tech companies plan to meet in San Francisco to discuss efforts to counter manipulation of their platforms.

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.

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, according to an email obtained by 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, the Facebook official wrote, will have a three-part agenda: each company presents the work they’ve been doing to counter information operations; a discussion period for problems each company faces; and a talk about whether such a meeting should become a regular occurrence.

In May, nine of those companies met at Facebook to discuss similar problems, alongside two US government representatives, Department of Homeland Security under secretary Chris Krebs and Mike Burham from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, created in November. Attendees left the meeting discouraged that they received little information from the government.

Tech companies, Facebook and Twitter in particular, have faced intense scrutiny for how slowly they initially reacted to reports that foreign intelligence and affiliated operations used their platforms to manipulate users ahead of the 2016 election, leading to drops in user confidence and a threat of regulation from lawmakers.

In February, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office charged 13 people affiliated with Russia’s Internet Research Agency — a “troll factory” where employees created personas across multiple platforms — with breaking laws in order to influence American voters. Since then, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and YouTube have each had at least one public purge of accounts believed to be foreign influence operations.

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The meeting highlights tech companies’ recent efforts to be more proactive with governments’ use of their sites to achieve political goals. Several companies have announced operations this week where they partnered with other organizations to address such problems.

On Tuesday, Microsoft announced that it had, for the 12th time since 2016, legally acquired control of a handful of web domains registered by Russian military intelligence for phishing operations, then shut them down. The next day, after receiving a tip from the threat intelligence company FireEye, Facebook and Twitter announced they had taken down a network of fake news sites and spoofed users meant to create sympathy for the Iranian government’s worldview. Google made a similar announcement about YouTube on Thursday.
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Kevin Collier is a cybersecurity correspondent for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

Contact Kevin Collier at [email protected].

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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kevincollier/tech-companies-are-gathering-for-a-secret-meeting-to

I wonder how long it will be until we start to see assasinations of corporate executives and Timothy McVeigh-style bombings on corporate locations.

There are better ways than that of fighting back.

fpni

Corporations colluding with deep state swamp rats publicly and evermore aggressively.

This won’t workout how they think.

Let's not even go there.

They aren't leaving us any other options.

By any means necessary.

The ends justify the means in the Long March Through the Institutions, comrade.

Utopia awaits.

The "their company, their rules" crowd will cheer this new corporate boot.

fpni. some people are a financial crisis away from saying "fuck it." ridding the world of evil people can be very fulfilling.

You have to wonder just who the big tech companies are getting money from.

May I present another some other "news story headlines" from the same site today?

Russian Trolls Are Spreading Confusion About Vaccine Safety On Twitter

"Front Hole" Is Not A New Word For "Vagina," Despite What The Internet Says

The Country's Top LGBT Group Is Campaigning Against A Queer Democratic Woman, And Some People Are Pissed

Pro tip - read the Twitter profiles of buzzfeed staff sometime. These people have no shame

We all know that this is all just an excuse to apply blatant  censorship to all non progressive voices.  They don't care anymore.  They are determined to win at all costs.  Just look around you.  People are being fired for simply saying certain words often out of context.  We are increasingly living in a real live Nazi Germany.  Only the progressives are the real nazies.

They really aren't. They are already sensoring us, lying to us, trying to sway our beliefs and ideals, monitoring everything we do online and they are pretty open about it now.

executive corporatist state. Surveillance state owns us.

Most of them were seeded in the 90s in part by NSA and CIA funding as well as innocent corporate funding as a means of surveillance both for national security and for consumer marketing.  To be honest, I suspect all involved never imagined what our modern digital world would turn into.  The first big users of the internet after all were porn distributors!

Well?????

And a lot of us are wide awake now and opening distrustful.

The big companies are rewarded with monopolistic advantage. This is Dehomag, Krupp and IG Farben levels of fuckedupedness during the Nazi regime years.

They think they can counter the Great Meme War of 2018?

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Attached File

I've been wondering if this is likely, as well.

It already happened. Crazy chick shot up Youtube after they demonitized her channel.

This is dangerous.

It's too bad that that only people smart enough to promulgate these technologies are Communists.

Already switched to https://www.minds.com/

That'll show them.

There was a twitter post about some newswoman who reported they received a threat from somebody, "sooner or later we're gonna start killing you assholes", or something to that effect.

The media doesn't seem to understand that if open hostilities ever break out, they will be the first to be targeted.

I fear it is already working out precisely like they hope it will.  They continue to censor content and input that doesn't meet with the narrative they want put forward.

Better to purge too many accounts than not enough.

It's somewhat fascinating to see what a lot of money, influence, and notoriety does to some people. It's like the people who run for HOA president to impose their will on others, just because it gives them a platform to do it.

Wouldn't this be interfering and doing what they have been accusing the Russians and or Trump of doing???

What would the political landscape look like if the press reported in an unbiased fashion?

They have come a long way toward shaping the country the way they want.

They hold the gateways to the internet, thus the gateways to communication. We can start a new conservative gateway, but how do we get the word out about where to go to access it? You won't see it on any of the mainstream sites or as ads on news sites. Forums like this one are a possibility but Arfcom is a small piece of a big population.

The progressives now hold most of the keys to communication, and they now feel confident enough to start publicly locking the doors to us.

Dunno about that, but being in SanFran, we oughta seize the opportunity and deliver upon to them a million hobo march around their meeting.

Those that make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.

In before memory of how the Clintons treated Americans is called Russian Collusion.

Too long.  Did I say that out loud?

And if they get through that, usually the first useful idiots that are up against the wall by the socialists/communists are the journalists, activists, loudmouths and those who have outlived their usefulness.

Its different when they do it.  You see, they're virtuous, and noble with nothing but honorable intentions.  Socialism and communism are great political ideologies, especially after you kill everyone who doesn't agree with it, and silence the slaves.

They'll get it right this time, they have the best and the brightest!

Not cheering for it, but still their company and their rules.

Settle down batfe agent

Getting probed?

Start a new conservative or even independent gateway and the ISPs would end up blocking it if it ever gets popular. They are not going to allow a peaceful solution other than complete surrender.

Will the frog survive?  Big target on its back.

This is what 'net neutrality' is really needed for.

What really frightens me more then the censorship is the freezing out process that the financial industry is undertaking against firearms companies and non leftist political activists.

Combine this with the "social credit" concept that has been rattling around in the background and you could have a real chilling effect on free speech.

It isn't too much of a leap from a cyber freezing of activists and companies that have non PC products down to everyday people. Be pretty simple to do too. There are demographic profiles, voter registration lists, campaign donation lists, organization membership lists, etc.

Say too many things on line that go against the PC groupthink mindset, like the wrong social media pages, watch the wrong shows on line, etc and you could find yourself unable to get credit cards, a mortgage, business financing, web hosting, participate in social media etc.

That's what THEY WANT US TO DO.

It's what the left is trying to get.  They are trying to drive us to do something stupid so they can use it as a springboard.

The solution is NOT to turn to violence, it's to circumvent their attempts to silence us and to get our message out in spite of them.

Then we can point to their measures and say "see, even when you can't claim election manipulation, YOU STILL LOST."

If we go the other way, we will lose, I guarantee.  The only way to go the other way and still win, is if we are responding to an attack by the left and defend ourselves.  Otherwise we will all be branded terrorists and it will be used as an excuse to try to disarm us, marginalize us, and we will effectually be helping the left more than ourselves.

LOL - that needs to be a bumper sticker.

So a secret meeting everyone knows about?

we'll have a 3 month long shadow banning of conservative messaging.

the "unexpected issue" will be miraculously fixed just a few days after the election cycle.

Private companies can do what they do without it being a 1st Amendment violation. It sucks, but the Internet will treat censorship as damage and route around it.  Censorship is a long-game anyway, so there is time for corrections to be made.

THIS, on the other hand, this shit needs to stop immediately:

Krebs and Burham need to be immediately fired.

On another note, I am growing real fucking tired of people saying "well it's not the rank and file doing this" when it FUCKING OBVIOUSLY IS.

did i make it in before "free market solutions"?

think we have time to get a significant competitor for twitter, facebook, and google up-and-running before the elections?