[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.