Article by Paula Bolyard in PJMedia
How to Stick It to Facebook in One Easy Step
This should be a no-brainer, but somehow the topic of the government subsidies for Facebook hasn’t received much attention in discussions about how to fight back against the Big-Tech giant and its intrepid fake-checkers (spelling intentional). That needs to change.
Good Jobs First, a website that tracks government subsidies and promotes “accountability in economic development,” reports that Facebook has received nearly $800 million in state, local, and federal subsidies since 2010.
According to the report, the top states subsidizing Facebook’s censorship-and-spying machine are Georgia ($355 million), Utah ($150 million), Texas ($148 million), Washington ($57 million), and Oregon (41 million).
In return for a promised $42 million investment in data centers in Georgia, Facebook was given a 20-year “megadeal” property tax abatement valued at $355 million. Facebook claims the data centers will create 300 jobs. That’s over $1 million per job created if you’re keeping score, with no guarantee that the jobs will go to current Georgia residents. While it’s true that the data centers will provide other jobs in the area—food service, retail, and temporary construction jobs, for example—an influx of Silicon Valley tech gurus would likely increase housing costs and stress local infrastructure. The tech giant scored a megadeal in Utah as well, with $150 million in subsidies for data centers.
Facebook is buying up land and blowing through electricity like it’s water all over the country—with the help of state governments—because it needs room to store the massive troves of data they’ve collected on the three-quarters of Americans who use the platform.
Whether or not the deals are a net gain or loss for the cities and states involved is a debate for another day. What’s not debatable is that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife poured $350 million into an advocacy group that funneled money into urban election offices, including in Atlanta, Georgia. Election lawyer and PJ Media contributor J. Christian Adams explains how it worked:
What these grants did was build structural bias into the 2020 election where structural bias matters most – in densely populated urban cores. It converted election offices in key jurisdictions with deep reservoirs of Biden votes into Formula One turnout machines. The hundreds of millions of dollars built systems, hired employees from activist groups, bought equipment and radio advertisements. It did everything that street activists could ever dream up to turn out Biden votes if only they had unlimited funding.
In 2020, they had unlimited funding because billionaires made cash payments to 501(c)(3) charities that in turn made cash payments to government election offices.
Flush with hundreds of millions in new cash, government election offices turned those donations into manpower, new equipment, and street muscle to turn often sluggish and incompetent urban election offices into massive Biden turnout machines across the country – in Madison, Milwaukee, Detroit, Lansing, Philadelphia, and Atlanta among dozens of others.
Adams says this scheme was the real “Kraken” in the 2020 election—and it was all perfectly legal. Did the soon-to-be-divorced Zuckerbergs help put Biden over the top in Georgia? We’ll never be able to prove that definitively, but $350 million and a cadre of well-placed election officials sure didn’t hurt.
Georgia, which welcomed Facebook with open arms and $355 million in subsidies is now stuck with a pair of hardcore leftists as senators, thanks in part to Zuck Bucks.
When Facebook representatives come to government officials, tin cup in hand, they make the case that having the data centers in their states will benefit its residents. How did Zuckerberg thank Georgia? By contributing to the most chaotic election in the country and helping to saddle the state with Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, radicals both. With friends like Zuckerberg, who needs enemies — and we haven’t even discussed how Facebook put its thumb on the scale in the 2020 election by censoring conservative voices on its platform. States shouldn’t be subsidizing this subversive anti-American behavior.
Yes, we should also be talking about whether Facebook should be broken up or should be forced to pay users royalties on the data they’re selling to advertisers, but step one should be to end the subsidies.
The next time Facebook comes calling in a state that values free speech and election integrity, officials should show them the door and tell them to go ruin another state. If states are going to insist on subsidies, they should go to locally owned businesses, not globalist mega-corporations that spend every waking minute thinking up new ways to destroy America as we know it.
