
Facebook big contributor to committees in Congress that will question Zuckerberg - cityzen
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/04/04/facebook-gave-most-contributions-house-committee-question-zuckerberg-also-got-most-contributions-fac/486313002/
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mtgx
I was waiting for something like this to come out. I remember I was thinking
how it was so strange that Facebook seemed to be making a big deal out of this
House hearing, which seemed to come out of nowhere, even though it was the
Senate committee that asked for a hearing first.

Also the Senate hearing was initially supposed to happen on April 12 I
believe, but they pushed it to April 10, and the House one is on April 11.

It wouldn't be the first hearing to me set-up where basically instead of
actually taking the guests to task, as a committee doing an investigation
should, they just basically pat them guests on the back for doing such an
awesome job. That's how the Diande Feinstein surveillance hearings end-up.

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seagull
I never understood why contributions by employees that happen to work at a
certain company are treated as such a "gotcha" moment by the media. Facebook
has 25000 employees. Presumably some fraction of those will choose to donate
to politicians they support, largely liberal ones given the political leanings
of Facebook's workforce -- over thousands of employees this adds up to a
significant amount of money. Does anyone think that these scattershot
individual contributions meaningfully influence any national politician in
favor of Facebook?

The PAC donations are of course a different story, but honestly the incentives
here just puzzle me. The limits on PAC contributions to candidates ($5000)
just seem so piddling to a company like Facebook that I don't understand where
the ROI comes from, especially after factoring in the negative PR. I doubt a
$5000 campaign donation will meaningfully influence my local school board
official, let alone a Representative or Senator. The only explanation that
makes any sense is that the broad PAC donations are just an expectation for
companies before their lobbyists' calls get returned -- an entrance ticket to
the Beltway circles. Obviously this is problematic, but in this case Facebook
isn't "buying" politicians -- at best it's paying them to be restored to
neutral.

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throwaway84742
And this, my liberal friends, is what’s “destroying our democracy”. Not some
mythical “collusion” of which we have zero evidence after a full year of
investigation.

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na85
Is there some other collusion story making the rounds? You're too vague.

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throwaway84742
As far as I know there’s only one. The only concrete finding so far is that
the guy whom Trump fired for lying also evaded taxes. Woop-de-freaking-do. He
sure is in trouble now.

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onetimemanytime
lets say that FB has to "buy" 600 influential people in USA, Congressmen,
Senators, Governors, AG etc.

600*$5,000 = $3 million a year. And $3 million is what to FB?

