Devin Coldewey
Tech Crunch
September 27, 2011
Facebook has filed to establish FB PAC, a political action committee intended to “give [Facebook’s] employees a way to make their voice heard in the political process,” presumably over and above voting and contributing independently to campaigns and other PACs.
The company has spent about a million dollars lobbying over the last three years, according to Senate records and documented by OpenSecrets, with the sum spent increasing every year. For comparison, Microsoft spent around $9m per year through its own PAC at its peak, though that number has gone down to about a third of that now. Establishing a PAC will enable Facebook to make direct contributions to candidates and parties, and if it chooses, spend unlimited sums bankrolling secondary efforts like independent ad campaigns.
We can’t be too sure exactly who or what FB PAC will support, but its spending so far has been significantly concentrated in industry-related issues such as internet privacy, foreign regulations on internet access, and of course weighing in on copyright questions, which would directly affect its business. You can read their official spending report here (PDF). The theoretical spending cap for PACs is several million dollars ($5000 per candidate per race and some miscellaneous allowances), so there’s plenty of room for them to grow into.
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