Hundreds of miles from Capitol Hill, look for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony to reverberate in the Missouri Senate race.
Rising public skepticism of the social media giant makes Facebook a ripe target for political attacks from both parties. In Missouri, where a battle is brewing over the influence of wealthy coastal elites, controversy swirling around the social media giant could get interesting.
Republican primary front-runner Josh Hawley is investigating the company’s data handling in his capacity as state attorney general, while his likely Democratic opponent, Sen. Claire McCaskill, has accepted $27,200 in contributions from Facebook employees and PACs to her campaign, this cycle alone (and another $7,500 to her own leadership PAC). Hawley’s campaign has sought to cast McCaskill as the “eager ally” of faraway elites, using her financial contributors to build their case.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, McCaskill, considered to be one of the Senate’s most vulnerable Democratic incumbents, ranks behind only Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., as the second highest recipient of campaign money from Facebook employees and PACs so far this cycle.
She’s also close with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who’s cut $21,200 worth of checks to McCaskill since 2011, most recently the maximum $2,700 in January of 2017. Sandberg has been panned along with Zuckerberg for her handling of the Cambridge Analytica controversy. The senator referred affectionately to Sandberg as “one of [her] besties” in a 2015 Facebook post. After being banned from the platform last fall, Austin Petersen, Hawley’s primary opponent, highlighted the ties between McCaskill and Sandberg as well, arguing Sandberg’s contributions to McCaskill did “not inspire confidence in Facebook’s neutrality.”
Back in 2012, Sandberg hosted McCaskill as a speaker at one of the regular monthly dinner parties she hosted for young women at her home and the senator spoke on behalf of her “Ban Bossy” campaign as well.
Hawley announced his investigation into Facebook last week, issuing a subpoena to the company on April 2. McCaskill does not appear to have commented on the controversy yet. Asked about his opponent’s record on consumer protection matters at the press conference on April 2, Hawley reportedly took a jab at McCaskill. “Senator McCaskill has failed to do her job in a lot of areas, whether that’s protecting consumers, protecting taxpayers, protecting farmers; the list goes on,” he argued.
In a statement to the Washington Examiner on Tuesday, Hawley zeroed in on McCaskill’s lack of public comment on Facebook. “Why has Senator McCaskill been silent on this issue? Who is she protecting?” he asked. “The personal information of Americans may have been misused dating back to the Obama campaign. We should be asking tough questions and investigating what access third parties had to some of our personal information and what they have done with it. Instead, we hear crickets from Senator McCaskill.”
In a campaign where McCaskill’s opponent is working to depict her as an out-of-touch politician with deep ties to wealthy elites, her extensive Facebook connections (like her ties to Hollywood) won’t be helpful as the faltering company makes headlines this week, especially if she stays quiet.
