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Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg
Three months after meeting at Facebook to discuss their plans to mitigate meddling in the 2018 midterm elections, a group of tech companies huddled at Twitter today to do it again.
According to a source familiar with the meeting, Twitter (TWTR), Facebook (FB), Microsoft (MSFT), and Alphabet‘s (GOOGL) Google were among today’s 13 attending companies, ending a whirlwind week of actions by some of the industry’s biggest names to tap the brakes on politically motivated hacking attacks.
It remained unclear what specifically was discussed at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters during the meeting, first reported by BuzzFeed.
Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft declined to comment. Google did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
The latest meeting comes shortly before Facebook and Twitter executives are to testify at the Senate Intelligence Committee on Sept. 5 about protecting their influential platforms from misinformation during the forthcoming elections. Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey is also expected to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Those two companies in particular have felt the heat from lawmakers over their unwitting roles in the 2016 presidential election, which has not only stained their brands but raised questions about the impact of propaganda and hate speech on their business models.
That, in turn, has prompted both companies to ratchet up security efforts, which was on full display earlier this week. On Tuesday, Facebook and Twitter separately said they took down hundreds of suspicious pages with ties to foreign countries as part of coordinated disinformation campaigns. Microsoft made a similar announcement.
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