Mark has been really successful in reframing his public image, but the reality? In 2023 Meta was the 9th largest spender on Washington lobbying, and the 2nd largest public company behind Amazon. It far outstrips Lockheed (14 million), Boeing (14.5 million) and General Motors (14.4 million). It spend 19 million in 2023 on lobbying, reflecting the sustained YoY increase since it spent 10 million in 2014. An undisclosed amount of that went to a firm that lobbied to ban TikTok, after it was leaked that among teens Facebook was being killed by TikTok. But testament to how effective his PR team has been is that far more people probably know about his haircut than his lobbying.

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...

Reminds me of "Anyone who was not a liberal at 20 years of age had no heart, while anyone who was still a liberal at 40 had no head." and variations of that.

Social media of all places is a tough place to try and find consensus. Some would argue that a global social media platform simply doesn't scale.

Still, he's successful by many measures because it has scaled.

While I can see Mark stepping away from direct action in politics simply because it is exhausting. Unfortunately his wealth is an indirect means of politics.

Money is a token of power, billions in the bank influences politics.

https://archive.ph/sBBCh

This is so disappointing. Zuckerberg's frustration is palpable. I sympathize in a 'no good deed' sense.

He spent millions trying to fix education. And what was his reward? At best the experiment failed. But we saw how the power structures felt threatened by his experiment.

And now I see presidents refusing to leave office and presidents' administrations pushing media censorship. Everyone should be concerned about this move towards Oceania.

I think this is just a symptom of the fact that politics in the US are irreparably broken. Mark seems like a fairly reasonable person overall, so of course he'd get frustrated with the insanity of it all. And conversely, a billionaire who isn't a reasonable person wouldn't, and would continue to stay actively involved in US politics...

They are destroying the whole PublicOpinionShapingAsAService industry by keeping despots from investing carbon money.

As with all stories about powerful people, you need to read this as “Mark Zuckerberg wanted a major news outlet to say he was being neutral in the US election”.

In a definition of “neutral” that only a Silicon Valley CEO could embrace, this article seems to be saying that misinformation will be less policed on the platform and he will be more friendly to Trump.

The article even attempts to pre-apologize for this 40-year old billionaires political choices, framing them as innocent (he’s really a nice progressive libertarian, really) and that he feels so hurt by criticism.

We really have to stop thinking of Zuckerberg as a naive youngster. It’s appropriate to treat his statements with skepticism. I don’t know anything about the man other than what I read in books or news, but many Silicon Valley CEOs are lining up behind Trump because they expect him to regulate them less. The only difference with Zuckerberg is that he seems to prefer to appear above the fray.