Comment by throwawayxyz987 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawayxyz987 | Hacker News Reader

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throwawayxyz987

BigTech is just as biased, if not more, only in the other direction.

https://www.vox.com/2018/10/31/18039528/tech-employees-polit...

    Employee donations to midterm candidates by party

    Netflix ($321K)     99.6% D    0.4% R
    Twitter ($228K)     98.7% D    1.3% R
    Airbnb ($107K)      97.8% D    2.2% R
    Apple ($1,218K)     97.5% D    2.5% R
    Stripe ($152K)      97.0% D    3.0% R
    Lyft ($47K)         96.1% D    3.9% R
    Google ($3,742K)    96.0% D    4.0% R
    Salesforce ($364K)  94.8% D    5.2% R
    Facebook ($1,066K)  94.5% D    5.5% R
    Tesla ($118K)       93.9% D    6.1% R
    eBay ($46K)         93.5% D    6.5% R
    PayPal ($84K)       92.2% D    7.8% R
    Microsoft ($1,480K) 91.7% D    8.3% R
    Amazon ($971K)      89.3% D   10.7% R
    Uber ($125K)        81.5% D   18.5% R
    HP ($73K)           80.0% D   20.0% R
    Intel ($353K)       78.5% D   21.5% R
    Oracle ($685K)      66.1% D   33.9% R

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/facebook-twitter-employees-...

> Twitter employees donated $347,270, or 98.99% of total federal donations, to Democrats, making individual donations of $200 or more. Meanwhile, only $3,556, or 1.01%, of federal donations from Twitter employees went to Republicans.

> Facebook employees donated $2.4 million, or 91.68% of total federal donations, to Democrats with donations of $200 or more via individuals or PACS. Only $218,576, or 8.2% of all federal donations from Facebook employees, went to Republicans.

This article isn't about BigTech. That's pure Whataboutism.

It also conflates donations from employees with that of their employers. There's a big difference between a billionaire like Koch individually spending hundreds of millions of dollars to block climate change, and thousands of individual tech employees donating small amounts of money towards their favorite causes and politicians.

This is uncharitable. The comment was in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25105426, which specifically mentioned employee contributions: "Still, his political spending remains almost entirely partisan. Koch Industries’ PAC and employees donated $2.8 million in the 2020 campaign cycle to Republican candidates and $221,000 to Democratic candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.". If Koch Industries employee donation bias is discussion worthy, so should be BigTech employee donation bias, which is even more strident.

Granted, the original article and the comment which cites it mixes PAC + employee. For the purposes of identifying political bias in an organization though, the employee donations are quite a bit more illuminating. PAC donations are more strategic investments in incumbents, thus tend so be roughly 50-50 in the current political landscape: "A company’s PAC donations have less to do with supporting a specific party than with accessing those in power. Corporate PACs donate the vast majority — 90 percent in the last midterm — of their money to incumbent candidates, who are much more likely to be elected than challengers. Tech companies are no different."

For completeness, here is Googles PAC + employee donation breakdown: 87% D, 13% R. On par with the partisanism of Koch Industries, which even Charles Koch decries as a mistake. I don't have the data to split KI PAC vs. KI employee donations.

Exactly, one is 2 individuals purchasing policies in an undemocratic fashion and another is a subset of a particular upper class group purchasing policies in an undemocratic fashion.

It's like comparing the weight of a pound of bricks to a pound of feathers.

If bias in KI PAC + employee donations is discussion worthy, then BigTech employee donations bias is also discussion worthy. It's the same corrosive behavior, just with the polarity reversed.

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