At the heart of Facebook’s rocky public position is the scale of its own power

By the end of the 2014 election, campaigns and political committees had directly spent about $8 million on Facebook advertising, less than half the amount they’d spent on Google. Through September of 2019, that figure neared $46 million, 50 percent more than what Google took in. And that’s only direct spending, excluding spending by political consultants on behalf of candidates or campaigns. In the 2016 campaign alone, Donald Trump’s team spent somewhere around $70 million on Facebook through a digital firm run by Brad Parscale, who is now Trump’s campaign manager. 

On Jan 9, Facebook announced that it would not significantly revise its rules regarding political advertising. Instead, users will be given the choice of seeing fewer political ads or opting out of targeted marketing — advertisements from campaigns and companies that use the personal information collected by Facebook to identify who should see them. It’s hard not to assume that part of that decision derived from the close business relationship between President Donald Trump's campaign and Facebook. The campaign, which raised half a billion dollars in 2019 across multiple political committees, spends heavily on Facebook ads even now. The Trump campaign’s Tim Murtaugh praised Facebook’s decision not to revise its policies on political advertising.

No company has been more effective at leveraging Facebook for its own dominance than Facebook. Its constituency is larger than President Trump’s, and its global scope is, in some senses, larger. That’s part of its value proposition, too. It’s powerful enough to perhaps deserve credit for getting a president elected. Should it be?