Silicon Valley Lashes Out at Mark Zuckerberg's Questionable Lobbying Methods

Has Mark Zuckerberg gone too far? By creating a bipartisan political pressure group in mid-April, “FWD.us,” meant to defend immigration reform, the young head of Facebook has ventured into a territory not for the faint-hearted. A month and a half later, he is already facing the consequences.

The controversy surrounds publicity campaigns FWD.us has financed — campaigns which defend the construction of a very controversial, giant oil pipeline, the Keystone XL, between Oklahoma and Texas; pleading for oil drilling in a nature reserve in Alaska and repeatedly denouncing “Obamacare,” the symbolic health care reform of Barack Obama’s first term in office.

In theory, it has nothing to do with the law on immigration. Their strategy aims, in fact, to support certain congressional Republicans, whose re-election in 2014 is under threat, and to ensure that these Republicans will vote in favor of the immigration law. The law should pass through the Senate in June, dominated by Democrats, before going to the House of Representatives, which has a Republican majority.

Zuckerberg is putting so much energy into defending this reform because he hopes it will “attract the most talented and hardest-working people, no matter where they were born,” as he explained in an article in The Washington Post in mid-April. In order to do this, he wants more work visas to be awarded to engineers, programmers and other IT geniuses from abroad who were educated in the U.S. and subsequently required to return to their native countries.

The head of the social network with a billion users isn’t the first to attract attention to this state of affairs. In 2007, the Kauffman Foundation, an association in support of entrepreneurs, highlighted that “more than a million qualified immigrant workers, of which some are scientists and engineers … are competing with each other for 120,000 American permanent residency visas every year, creating an important imbalance susceptible to feeding an inverted brain drain.” As a result of this, between 1995 and 2005, 52 percent of start-ups created in the region were founded by a foreign citizen, compared with 44 percent in the past.

On the other hand, the trade unions don’t have the same version of the facts: They accuse the giants in Silicon Valley of wanting to “import” poorly qualified people willing to work for low wages.

‘REALPOLITIK’

Whatever it may be about, the stakes are sizeable. This is something of which the big players of Silicon Valley, like Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Google president Eric Schmidt, and even Yahoo boss Marissa Mayer, who all support FWD.us, are well-aware.

The type of lobbying Zuckerberg chose faces strong opposition, ironically, from Zuckerberg’s peers in leading the social media revolution, as the Bloomberg agency noted. One of the first to be openly hostile was Josh Miller, creator of the social platform Branch and new network heartthrob, who didn’t hesitate to denounce the “questionable lobbying methods” and lack of transparency concerning “the underlying values and the long term intentions of the organization,” as well as its financing, since FWD.us is not obliged to reveal the names of its donors. For famous technology blogger Anil Dash, it’s nothing more nor less than realpolitik.

At the start of May, a spokesperson for the association responded that FWD.us was “aware that everyone will not always be delighted with [its] strategy,” all the while reaffirming that it remained “determined to support bipartisan solutions which further the economy with knowledge.”

Nothing was done about it: The attacks continue. Vinod Khosla, previous CEO of software developer Sun Microsystems, tweeted, “wish Fwd.us would admit mistake instead of defending their stance.”

As a result, certain players in the sector have already turned their backs on Mark Zuckerberg, like Paypal co-founder Elon Musk and David Sacks, founder of social network Yammer. Others, like progressive groups the Sierra Club and Democracy for America, went straight to the source by putting an end to their advertising contracts with Facebook.

With a certain sense of ridicule, several environmental and pro-Democrat organizations, such as League of Conservation Voters and MoveOn.org, have regrouped to criticize FWD.us via a Facebook page with 20,000 fans and a Tumblr inviting Marissa Mayer to “let go” of the lobby, reports Bloomberg. To quote Becky Bond, vice president of the progressive group CREDO: “They have built their careers on communities of millions of users. We just want to make sure those users know what they’re doing.”