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.
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.
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.
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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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 23.3 ms ] threadAlso 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.
600*$5,000 = $3 million a year. And $3 million is what to FB?
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.