Technology

DNC And Big Tech Team Up To Ding Alleged Misinformation Ahead Of Democratic Debates

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The Democratic National Committee and two Silicon Valley giants are working together to police platforms for misinformation ahead of the first presidential debates, CNN reported Thursday.

The DNC is monitoring disinformation daily and is alerting Facebook and Twitter if it sees false information going viral, the report noted. Both companies have previously taken action against accounts after tips from the DNC, representatives for the companies told CNN.

A DNC representative said the committee will be in touch with both companies ahead of the debate.

This comes after Facebook and Twitter participated in a DNC seminar that discussed electoral campaigns, wherein the companies provided information about how the committee can share details of suspicious activity with them. Those details were also shared with the Republican National Committee, the DNC representative told CNN.

The RNC has not responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for confirmation regarding the DNC’s claim.

“It’s always an election year on Twitter,” a spokeswoman for Twitter told CNN. “We’re a global service and we think globally. We will take the learnings from every recent election — including the EU, India, and the 2018 U.S. Midterm Elections — and use them to improve our election integrity work for 2020.”

Facebook and Twitter have experienced pressure to clean up their platforms after reports highlighted the extent to which Russia used them to troll American voters ahead of the 2016 election. Facebook, for its part, is working overtime to nix what the company said are phony accounts that could be responsible for spreading disinformation.

Facebook also deployed 40 people across Europe in May to monitor the shifting pace of online conversation, any signs of manipulation, fake news and hate speech. Intelligence experts, data scientists, researchers and engineers backed up the social media company’s efforts before European elections.