WASHINGTON - Facebook’s higher calling has become a liability in its dealings with U.S. politicians. The social network is getting grief from lawmakers for hiring Washington consultants to fight critics. Many companies do that, including older tech firms, but Facebook has for a long time styled itself as more than just a company. The cost of that is that it’s being held to a higher standard.

Mark Zuckerberg’s firm describes itself as setting out to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” When Facebook filed for its IPO in 2012, Zuckerberg wrote that Facebook was not originally created to be a company, but a vehicle for a “social mission.” Those kinds of aims made it – like other Silicon Valley tech firms that pitch benevolent goals – a D.C. darling, especially among Democrats.

That friendship is now in jeopardy. Several U.S. senators wrote a letter last week expressing anger that Facebook hired a firm called Definers Public Affairs to do research into its critics, including a group that wanted to break the company up. Definers, whose relationship with Zuckerberg’s company was first reported in the New York Times, helped prepare Facebook for showdowns with lawmakers by analyzing who had received donations from the company or placed ads on the platform. That may exacerbate calls for Facebook to be reined in, through tougher privacy standards or yet more congressional hearings.

In fact, such hardball tactics are commonplace in Washington. Definers also counts chipmaker Qualcomm as a client; mobile operator AT&T  and media group Comcast have in the past reminded lawmakers of their political donations when they are under congressional scrutiny. In 2013, satellite firm Dish Network ran an aggressive campaign to block SoftBank's takeover of Sprint, trying to link the Japanese firm to a corruption case. And among the other heavy users of opposition-research firms: lawmakers themselves.

In some ways, Facebook isn’t a traditional company – its supervoting shares keep Zuckerberg in power and give shareholders little say in how the firm behaves. But in its attempt to use its financial weight and political clout to advance its own interests, as Senator Brian Schatz put it to Politico, Facebook is just doing what hundreds of companies do. If it hadn’t set the bar so high, lawmakers might not be quite so keen to bring Zuckerberg back down to earth.

On Twitter https://twitter.com/GinaChon

 

CONTEXT NEWS

- Several U.S. senators sent Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg a letter on Nov. 16 asking for information about its relationship with Definers Public Affairs, a Washington, D.C. public-affairs firm hired by the social-media company to research its critics.

- The New York Times reported on Nov. 14 that Definers worked to discredit activists pushing for a breakup of the company and asked a Jewish civil-rights group to cast some critics as anti-Semitic.

- The Democratic senators who wrote the letter are Richard Blumenthal, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner. “We are gravely concerned by recent reports indicating that your company used contractors to retaliate against or spread intentionally inflammatory information about your critics,” they wrote.

- After the New York Times report was published, Facebook said it would discontinue its relationship with Definers. Definers said in a statement that its main services for Facebook were media monitoring and public relations, and its work was based on publicly available information.

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(Editing by John Foley and Martin Langfield) ((gina.chon@thomsonreuters.com; Reuters Messaging: gina.chon.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net))