Leaked email: representatives of the top US tech companies are meeting in SF today to discuss their tactics in preparation for the 2018 midterm elections
Representatives from a host of the biggest US tech companies, including Facebook and Twitter, have scheduled a private meeting for Friday …
Context & Ripple Effects
This meeting is the latest step in a coordination pattern that has been building since at least 2016, when Silicon Valley CEOs first sat down with top government officials over online threats (that early CEO-level session), and it follows a June gathering where tech companies met intelligence officials on midterm threats but the FBI and DHS declined to share specifics (that information-sharing standoff). With government holding back threat detail, the platforms appear to be filling the gap by coordinating tactics among themselves.
The timing matters: days earlier, Recode reported Facebook was standing up a physical war room for the midterms — a first for a US election (Facebook's midterm war room) — so this cross-company session suggests platform-by-platform defenses are being supplemented by shared playbooks.
First-order effects
- Facebook and Twitter representatives leave the session with aligned tactics heading into the final stretch before November, complementing Facebook's already-announced internal war room structure.
- Because the FBI and DHS withheld specific threat information at the June meeting, the burden of identifying and countering interference now sits squarely on the platforms' own coordinated efforts rather than on government briefings.
Second-order effects
- Recurring private coordination among direct competitors invites scrutiny of its own — the same populist turn against Silicon Valley that surfaced around the 2017 congressional hearings gives critics a ready-made narrative about closed-door collusion.
- If the government won't share threat detail, expect the platforms to push harder for a formalized channel, since ad-hoc meetings like this one are a poor substitute for an institutional pipeline.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward election security hardening into a standing joint function across Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft rather than a per-election scramble — a trajectory the corpus bears out when the same four companies convened a daylong session with US officials ahead of 2020 (the 2020 election-security meeting).
- If private coordination keeps substituting for government information-sharing, the de facto regulator of election integrity on social platforms becomes the platforms themselves, with Congress left reacting after the fact.
The trend: US tech platforms are converting one-off crisis meetings into a recurring, self-organized election-security apparatus that persists across election cycles regardless of what Washington shares.