IMO, politicians are doing exactly what the people are asking for, which is spending their time virtue signalling rather than writing and negotiating meaningful legislation. Besides that, they do care about handouts, which is why we have so much pork barrel spending and stimulus checks.

It's convenient to blame money in politics, but if that were the case, Congress would at least get something done. For example, Facebook, despite being one of the most heavy lobbying spenders, has spent even more money establishing their content Oversight Board. If they could actually buy politicians, we'd have more regulation that happens to benefit big tech. Both the Republican solution of not allowing social media companies to censor content and the Democratic solution of creating more rules for moderate disinformation are beneficial to Facebook because they can offload some of the responsibility of moderation to the government.