With the announcement that Silicon Valley big names will join forces to discuss with government agencies [how] To secure the November election “comes the question: does it matter?
As reported by The New York Times, groups from Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google will meet with the cyber security and infrastructure security agency and the National Security Division of the Department of Justice. LinkedIn, which is also owned by Microsoft, Pinterest, Reddit, Verizon Media and Wikimedia Foundation.
Today we joined other technology companies and US government agencies for a more regular meeting on our election security efforts. You can read our joint statement here: pic.twitter.com/zO6GD8RHX6
& Mdash; Google Public Policy (@googlepubpolicy) August 12, 2020
In at least 100 days before the election and due to problems on political advertisements and misinformation circulating on all major social media platforms, some of these platforms have chosen to take action individually: Facebook and Twitter, at least, Fake news posts have started flagging and fact-checking publicly, even though they come from President Donald Trump. But at this point, what kind of effectiveness can a large coalition have?
“There’s still an opportunity to make an impact,” said Ben Goodman, senior vice president of cybercity firm ForgeRock. “But I think it’s really too late. This is not something they are going to fix between now and November. “
Rick Forno, a former chief security officer at Network Solutions for the US House of Representatives and currently director of the University of Maryland’s Cyberspace Center, resonated with Goodman’s idea.
“I don’t think it would hurt,” Forno said. “But I’m not sure how effective it will be. I think tech companies are trying to apply a lot of lessons. [the] 2016 [election], But this is no longer the solution. “
Missinformation doesn’t know any weather – it just doesn’t go away when the election is over. Forno said tech and social media companies are required to operate election-related war rooms every day of the year. This was not enough to get the regulation up the ramp six months in advance and then landed on the ramp a week later.
“You need to make plans to be able to make everything grow at the appropriate time,” Forno said. “You cannot stop everything on November 10 and say that you are working till mid-term. You have to keep the process of identifying fake news, fake audio and video, disinfection, all these sophisticated. “
The two experts compare the alliance to the way that American banks currently communicate about fraud: resources pooling on recent scams without sharing intellectual property. Goodman said that he believes that this alliance can be good, but there is less time left until the election, there is not much time left to fix all the problems on these platforms.
“It makes a lot of sense for these different services to start signal sharing,” Goodman said, adding that de-platforming a problematic figure often changes the figure that the platform Maintains its disinfection to perform platforming on the platform. “If they can band together, it can be really effective,” he said. “But it will require a level of maturity that I don’t think we have achieved yet.”
Reddit said it did not comment on the alliance. Google said in a statement to , in part: “For the past several years, we have worked closely to counter information operations across platforms.” Google also said in its statement that it would remain “vigilant” against misinformation.
Other companies involved have not yet responded to a request for comment.
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