For Facebook, Ukraine War Offers Opportunities To Buck Regulation

By Eli Clifton, Responsible Statecraft

It should come as no surprise that Facebook, alongside many big tech companies, opposes anti-monopoly regulatory efforts, expanding antitrust rules, and strengthening privacy and user rights. But Facebook has taken its advocacy against congressional efforts to regulate the industry to new heights: it has now partnered with the weapons industry to scare Americans about China and Russia.

In 2020, Facebook, which changed its name to Meta in October, 2021, launched American Edge, a political advocacy group claiming to represent “a coalition dedicated to the proposition that American innovators are an essential part of U.S. economic health, national security and individual freedoms.”

“With direct financial ties to the Chinese Communist Party, many Chinese companies present threats to America’s national security but some Washington politicians are pushing for new laws that will empower Alibaba, Tik Tok and other Chinese companies at the expense of America’s tech innovators,” says an American Edge YouTube ad from January that ran between 100,000 and one million times in the greater Washington, DC area. Edge spent over $1.4 million running that ad and similar ones on Facebook.