In April, President Obama traveled to Palo Alto to participate in a Facebook "townhall" moderated by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, where both Facebook employees and Facebook users submitted questions for Obama. That session seemed to kick off a bipartisan social media frenzy. In July, Twitter's chairman, Jack Dorsey, was invited to the White House to lead a question-and-answer session where questions for Obama were plucked from the tweet stream. Last Thursday, Google was FoxNews' co-host for the Republican presidential debate. Yesterday, the same day the Facebook PAC news broke, Obama participated in a last-minute forum at LinkedIn headquarters moderated by CEO Jeff Weiner. Also Monday, Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg led a morning Q&A session with the "Young Guns," "Republican congressmen Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and Paul Ryan. If Sandberg was tired, that's understandable -- the night before, she and her husband had thrown a $35,800-per-couple campaign fundraiser for Obama at their Atherton, Calif., home.
In all these events (well, save the Sandberg fundraiser -- that you weren't invited to), the lines between Facebook user and Facebook employee, between Google.com and Google Inc. were so blurry as to not exist.
Should these sessions set off more alarm bells? Perhaps. Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn -- these are web platforms that Americans use and enjoy a great deal. But one imagines what would happen were the Obama White House to announce a "townhall" session moderated by AT&T's CEO where citizens could call and ask their president a question (provided that they could get a cellphone connection). People would probably complain; AT&T registers in the public imagination as a corporation, with the usual attendant corporate interests.
The Facebook PAC: When Social Media Discovers It's Big Business
via theatlantic.com
