Report Exposes Facebook’s Spending To Define Regulation And Shape Govt

For years Facebook was the hottest platform on Earth and in the best of ways. Everyone wanted to be on Facebook. The company grew to 1.7 billion users by 2016 with relatively little money spent on ads or traditional methods of growth. When I moved to Silicon Valley to consult with Google in 2016 I spent my time with friends who worked at Facebook and were head over heels for the purpose it brought to their life. Not shortly after, that narrative would change and the real Facebook would be exposed for the world to see. In a short period of time, we would come to realize that Facebook is not here to connect people, as it claims, it is here to connect data scientists to data that can systematically manipulate the world.

A Decade’s Long PR Story Shattered By Transparency

In December 2015 it was exposed that data was being shared with a company called Cambridge Analytica. It wouldn’t be until years later that the public would truly understand what this meant. But according to a recent report called The Facebook Receipts from The Citizens, a not-for-profit journalism organization with a focus on democracy, data rights, and disinformation, it was clear years before this public awareness that Facebook knew it was in for a major change to its reputation. Facebook knew that the public was about to realize what its real purpose was, and that it was not the friendly app about connecting people that everyone thought.

Manipulation And Control Has A High Price

If the 2015 announcement of Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of data marked the turning point for Facebook, it’s clear to see it in their spending. Before Cambridge Analytica, the company spent $31.4 million on lobbying from 2009 through 2015. Compare that to the $109.7 million that’s been spent since Cambridge Analytica, from 2016 to 2022. That’s a near 250 percent increase once society started to get a peak behind the scenes. But if you move the needle only two more years and take the numbers from 2014, those numbers are even worse: $12.3 million all-time, before 2014 compared to $128.9 million after—a near 950 percent increase!

Similar patterns can be seen in the company’s ad spending. According to a report by Statista, Facebook has spent $10.6 billion in advertising after 2018 compared to just over $1 billion in all previous years leading up to 2018. While the report lacks data before 2014 if you took that split after 2014 you’d see that Facebook’s spend changed dramatically over a short period of time:

• from $135 million in 2014
• to $281 million in 2015
• to $1.1 billion in 2018
• and as high as $2.9 billion in 2020.

It’s safe to say the majority of Facebook’s spend happened after 2014. Perhaps 2014 was the year Facebook became aware of its internal problems and the threat it would prove to its business model if the public knew.

Feature-Less Marketing

Most companies spend money to tell you about the features of their product and the benefits those features will bring to your life. And relatively none of those companies ever reach the size Facebook has. Now consider the fact that Facebook is a company that grew from zero users to ~1.7 billion users with nearly zero dollars spent on advertising or lobbying and then, in the past half-decade, has ramped that spending up nearly 10x to grow to ~3 billion users—not even double. And their message? Their messaging has been all about why we should trust them.

An early campaign, one of the first big spends, tells us “From now on, Facebook will do more to keep you safe and protect your privacy.” That same campaign was matched with physical signage all over the world talking about how spam, fake news, clickbait, fake accounts, and other malignant aspects of Facebook are not our “friends” and how Facebook would do better.

In pair with all this media, Mark Zuckerberg went on a years-long apology tour going coast to coast in the United States—big city to small rural town—trying to connect with people in real life. This campaign was complemented with full-page ads in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and myriad other Magazines stating “We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.”

To follow the campaign we’ve seen nothing short of the opposite of their promise to be true. In 2019 we saw The Great Hack released on Netflix. A year later, The Social Dilemma. One more year, Francis Haugen released internal paperwork demonstrating everything we’ve seen in the movies to be true. In pair with these events are what seem to be monthly headlines about abuses of data, enforcement actions, or other bad news about Facebook. Early May 2023 we saw that Facebook is being sued by the FTC for misleading parents and abusing children’s data it promised to protect. Just days ago it was revealed that Meta’s Pixel technology has helped the company obtain highly sensitive patient data from NHS in the UK for years despite a lack of patient consent.

One event is a conversation point, perhaps an accident by a company. Multiple, repeating events over time, each different but similar, is a validation of ingrained behavior. These events built upon the other, cementing history. Each, alone, represents a small piece of the story of Facebook. Together, they demonstrate what Facebook is—a data-hungry monopoly more interested in abusing its power than following through on its word.

Facebook And Big Tech Don’t Want To Be Regulated, They Want To Write The Regulations

With a proliferation of media, laws, and public outcry over the last half-decade its become clear that Facebook’s money isn’t working as well as it had hoped. The public is aware and the next generation is more capable of fighting back than any previous generation. At this point in history, it’s more likely that we see a narrative similar to Big Tobacco than it is that we all become friends with Facebook again. And if we investigate Facebook’s recent media, it’s also clear that they feel the same.

As awareness has grown, growth has slowed and regulators have become hungrier, Facebook’s narrative has pivoted from convincing us to be their friend—you should trust us—to one of self-defense. The new narrative is about how the industry needs regulation and, just like every monopoly before it, Facebook is ready to help shape that regulation.

If you listen to the videos you hear the phrases “the right regulation” and “a consistent approach” to regulation. What Facebook is doing here is no different than every other power-hungry monopoly in the past. They’re trying to play soft so they can lull the public to sleep and work regulators to their benefit. They want broad, sweeping laws that supersede state law and reduce their responsibilities to a minimum. Now more than ever we must keep our defenses up.

Facebook Is Invested In Its Future, Not The People Using Its Platform

The Facebook Receipts is the first publicly available, open-source research tool that tracks Facebook court hearings, harms, money, and FOIA filings. From the lobbying dollars in congressional halls to the political donations on parliamentary floors, The Facebook Receipts project is the only comprehensive collection of original data and visualizations that pull back the curtain of Facebook’s influence operations worldwide. The documentation, which will be regularly updated, includes data that track Facebook’s:

Harms — Where Facebook’s fingerprints can be traced around the world.

Dollars — How many members of Congress are on Facebook’s payroll?

Hearings — Instances in which Facebook has misled or downright lied to government officials.

Donations — Dollars Facebook spent in the 2020 and 2022 elections on political candidates.

The purpose of The Facebook Receipts is to bring transparency to the ways Facebook has been spending money behind the scenes to control our regulators for years on end. It required years of pursuing Freedom of Information Requests, careful documentation of court cases, and detailed reporting of not just lobbying behavior but where it is being spent. This project took a team of knowledgeable professionals three years to string together, which is three years longer than we should have to wait to find out how much we’re being manipulated.

Without reports like The Facebook Receipts and others, we’d lack the ability to put the dots together. While the details of this report may be concerning, keep in mind, this is only for Facebook. Imagine what we’d see if the funding were in place to turn over Silicon Valley at large.

Desperate Times Call For Excessive Lobbying

The Facebook Receipts also reveals a story of a company on the ropes—one that is desperately spending money in the name of self-preservation. Big Tobacco did the same on its way out. It’s time our lawmakers do better to protect our children, our local communities, and our national security. It’s time they choose freedom rather than surveillance as the platform they leverage to run for re-election.

For the last decade, these companies have built addictions to strip-mine the mental well-being of our society in favor of endless profitability. The addictions were never the intent, they were simply the outcome and in the process, they have destroyed the mental well-being of our nation and nations abroad with no intent to turn back.

But it doesn’t stop in our minds, it only starts there. This dramatic increase in mental illness has manifested as physical, and material damage to our world as well—significant increases in suicide, especially amongst children; dramatic increases in mass shootings and gun violence; lack of sleep due to addictions to our screens that emit circadian rhythm altering blue light; among other findings. After years of empirical research and lack of change, it must be stated that 8if we don’t see things change soon we are left to wonder: are our representatives simply complicit in the crime? Perhaps their pockets are lined too tight to care.

Unlike software, our brains can not simply be pushed an update from the app store. Society does not change at the speed of WiFi. This is a human problem and this change, like the reduction of smoking habits, will take generations. It’s time we start now. It’s time we close our metaphorical browser tabs and wipe this virus from our brains. Ignoring these behaviors and continuing forward as if everything is normal is criminal.