[post_ads]Facebook
has called its fellow tech giants for a meeting to talk about their
plans to prevent foreign influence and disinformation campaigns this
upcoming midterm elections, according to BuzzFeed News.
The publication says it got its hands on an email from the social
network, scheduling a discussion with Google, Microsoft, Snapchat and
other companies at Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco on Friday.
Part of the letter written by Facebook head of cybersecurity policy
Nathaniel Gleicher reads:
"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."
The email also revealed that the
meeting's purpose is to hear what each company has been doing to combat
all kinds of information operation, to discuss the issues each of them
are facing and to decide whether that kind of meet-up should become a
regular occurrence.
Friday's meeting shows Facebook's efforts to
become a lot more proactive when it comes to preventing bad actors from
using its platform to spread propaganda and fake election-related news.
The social network became the target of a never-ending tsunami of
criticisms after it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica used data collected from Facebook to influence voters to favor the politicians it's working with.
Investigators
also found that Russian troll farms used the platform to interfere with
the 2016 US Presidential Elections. Earlier this year, US officials indicted
13 Russian nationals, all of whom were involved in the illegal use of
social media to sow political discord in 2016. Both issues earned Mark
Zuckerberg an invite to Congressional and Senate hearings, where he got grilled for info.
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This isn't the first meeting Facebook arranged to talk about the midterm elections. Back in June, the company organized
a similar meeting with representatives from the FBI's foreign influence
task force to ask about the kinds of threats tech giants might face
this election season. Over the past months, Facebook also teamed up with the Atlantic Council to fight foreign election meddling and removed dozens of fake Pages and accounts made to interfere with this year's midterms. Most recently, the social network suspended
400 apps, including Cambridge University-developed application
"myPersonality," which collected personal info from millions of Facebook
users and shared that collection with researchers and companies.
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