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ChrisArchitect: [dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362528

qoez: Only 26 million is way way lower than I expected, especially given how much these companies make in profit

bondarchuk: Scott Alexander had a few posts about that ("why is there so little money in politics?"): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tech-pacs-are-closing-in-on...

yunohn: Feels like a lot of words to avoid thinking about “black” money and favors in kind. For example, nobody would include Trump’s golden bar from Switzerland in such ann estimate - repeated ad nauseam for all lobbying corruption.

Calvin02: Wasn't it Apple that was trying to get Meta to implement age verification in the first place? So, Meta is trying to get them to do it, which seems right.Why does Apple always get a free pass?

bryan0: Main takeaway:> Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deployed 86+ lobbyists across 45 states, and covertly funded a "grassroots" child safety group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) to advocate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA). The ASAA requires app stores to verify user ages before downloads but imposes no requirements on social media platforms. If it becomes law, Apple and Google absorb the compliance cost while Meta's apps face zero new mandates.

lapcat: I think one of the reasons politicians can be bought so cheaply by interest groups is that the opponents of the interests groups have practically no money. The interest groups don't need to spend a ton as long as they spend more than their opponents.The linked post talks about the effectiveness of AIPAC but fails to mention how much is spent by say, Palestinian interest groups. Perhaps there's a good reason for this: do Palestinian groups have any money to spend on US elections? Try fundraising in Gaza right now.Likewise, business interest groups have a lot more money to spend on elections than, say, environmental groups. The latter have to beg for small donations from individuals just to stay afloat. Thus, it's relatively easy for business groups to outspend environmental groups.

christoph: "Emails from October 2005 show that after Mandelson complained to Epstein about a lack of British Airways air miles, Epstein offered to pay for his plane tickets to the Caribbean."[1]The biggest shocker to me has been just how "cheap" a lot of people are to buy off. Mandelson is complaining about air miles FFS. So much of this is a few thousand here, some fancy tickets there, a jet ride elsewhere, etc. In my mind it was always much, much bigger sums that people were selling their countries & souls out for, sadly, it turns out a lot of people, even in really high positions, are shockingly cheap.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Peter_Mandelso...

Fiveplus: Anyone reading this purely as a child safety or campaign finance story might miss the broader architectural war happening here. If you zoom out a little, this is the inevitable, scorched-earth retaliation for Apple's ATT rollout from a few years back.Apple cost Meta billions by cutting off their data pipeline at the OS level, justifying it with a unilateral privacy moral high ground. Now, Meta is returning the favor. By astroturfing the App Store Accountability Act through digital childhood alliance, Meta is forcing Apple to build, maintain and also bear the legal liability for a wildly complex state-by-state identity verification API.Gotta give it to Zuck. Standing up a fully-fledged advocacy website 24 hours after domain registration and pushing a bill from a godaddy registration to a signed Utah law in just 77 days is terrifyingly efficient lobbying.

dfedbeef: Idk the low road is generally the easier one.

mentalgear: Well, I certainly prefer if big tech fight each other instead of the user as sometimes there might even come something good out of it - like elevated privacy in Apple's ATT case.Overall, that's the reason anti-trust laws must be applied rigorously, otherwise the normal population has no chance.

mlyle: Sometimes something good (ATT). Sometimes something bad (this terrible age-verification thing that is a huge barrier to entry for small entrants and comes with massive state surveillance risk).In the end, all the little people are just collateral damage or occasionally they get some collateral benefits from wherever the munitions land.

jaggederest: I donated $100 to my state's gubernatorial campaign as a part of my annual "make the world a better place" campaign, and was surprised to receive a call from an unknown number the following day. It was the Governor, thanking me for my donation personally, and wondering if there were any issues close to my heart that she could keep in mind. Note that this was from her personal cell phone (for whatever value of personal an executive politician actually has, but still), and she invited me to phone her if I had any issues that the state government could resolve.That's a wildly low sum of money for a 5 minute personal call, let alone even a modest intervention.

bee_rider: We should really come up with a system where the entire population chips in a little bit of money and we hire some lobbyists to represent us.