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It goes without saying that I am not a fan of Silicon Valley tech giants.
Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon, the lot of them — despite the undoubted ways they have pushed our species into the future, there is something inherently nefarious about them.
Just think about some of the great sci-fi stories of our lifetime:
- Terminator takes place in a world undone by Skynet.
- Blade Runners only exist in Blade Runner because of the Tyrell Corporation.
- And more recently, the strings behind Westworld are being pulled by the mysterious.
All of these examples just prove that behind every massive international technology company is some shady, shady shit that has the potential to push life as we know it to the brink.
So when all of the aforementioned international technology companies announce that they will be having a meeting, I’m obviously quick to raise an eyebrow.
According to BuzzFeed News, representatives of some of the biggest tech companies, including Facebook and Twitter, have scheduled a private meeting to share their tactics in preparation for the 2018 midterm elections.
Sounds good, right? That’s exactly what they want you to believe.
via 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, 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 will present the work they’ve been doing to counter information operations; there will be 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.
All kidding aside, if the reports are to be taken at face value, then it’s good that these world-shaping companies have decided to put their trillion-dollar-heads together to solve a very real problem.
Regardless, I still don’t trust em’.
