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Let’s dispense with this fiction that Mark Zuckerberg isn’t running for some kind office. He’s running for office. There is, of course, his well-publicized, impeccably documented, and sumptuously photographed apple pie tour of all fifty states, which, as most people will tell you, is something all thirty-three-year-old billionaires suddenly decide to do with no ulterior motive. But even beyond that, we also know Zuckerberg engineered the company’s rules so that he could remain in control of Facebook even while serving in government indefinitely. The endgame here is not particularly hard to figure out. But contrary to popular belief, if Zuckerberg is somehow elected president or takes another kind of government position in a few years time, this won’t be the first time he’ll be wielding influence over people’s lives through the halls of power. Zuckerberg has been doing so for years through Facebook’s extensive lobbying efforts. The vast bulk of Facebook’s lobbying has been concentrated on what you might expect. These are issues that directly affect the company’s operations and its interaction with government, such as bills related to the government’s access to data on Facebook’s customers and consumer protection, cyber-bullying legislation, and topics like privacy, voice and facial recognition software, and government surveillance. But Facebook has also on numerous occasions departed from this set of issues to lobby on a host of others, from corporate taxes to business regulations. Facebook’s lobbying history gives us a good indication of what kinds of things a President Zuckerberg — who, let’s not forget, will almost certainly decide not to divest from his company, thanks to Trump’s precedent — might do.

Smartest Guys in the Room Facebook has also lobbied on bills related to scaling back regulations and “red tape.” One such bill was the AGREE Act, introduced by Marco Rubio, which tried to exclude certain businesses from Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. That might seem like a pretty obscure hill to die on, but its relatively dull-sounding name obscures its importance. Sarbanes-Oxley was passed in the wake of the Enron scandal — where executives used dodgy accounting to hide the company’s increasingly gargantuan losses and bilk clueless investors — to protect investors from such rank dishonesty. The law’s Section 404(b) required companies to have a public accountant look over the company’s evaluation of its internal control over financial reporting and attest that it’s adequate, thus preventing future corporate fraud. While seemingly innocuous, it had long been a target of conservatives, with David Addington — best known as the Dick Cheney legal adviser who helped institute a global torture regime and advance the idea of the president as lawless emperor — arguing at the Heritage Foundation that it should be repealed to “help create jobs.” Facebook also lobbied on the Red Tape Reduction and Small Business Creation Act of 2012, which froze what its supporters called “economically significant regulations that harm the economy” as long as unemployment remained at 6 percent or above. The bill also permanently blocked administrations from issuing such regulations during a lame duck period, and other measures meant to slow the advance and effectiveness of regulations. Given that the company has historically chafed against government regulations, it’s not exactly outlandish to think it would have supported such legislation. But such sweeping laws could have some widespread consequences: as the National Resources Defense Council pointed out in a post about the Red Tape Reduction and Small Business Job Creation Act, the bill would have blocked the EPA’s then-new pesticide regulations.

Let’s Make a Deal Free trade deals are another area where Facebook has spent its fair share of lobbying time and money. “Free trade agreements” and “trade promotion authority” were listed among the issues it lobbied on in the fourth quarter of 2015, when it spent nearly $2 million on lobbying. This would likely have been directed at the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the unpopular and quite terrible “free trade” deal that was being pushed by Obama at the time and turned into a major election issue through 2016. The trade promotion authority, also known as fast-track authority, was a measure advanced by Obama that would have forced a simple up-or-down vote on the agreement, preventing it from being filibustered or amended, thus making it easier to pass. After keeping mum on the issue for some time, the Internet Association — the trade group that counts Facebook, Google, and Amazon among its members — endorsed the TPP, shortly after this lobbying by Facebook took place. The agreement directly benefited these companies by giving data the legal protections of goods in international trade law. But more fundamentally, it also benefited them through provisions like the investor-state dispute settlements, which allow corporations to take governments to court over new regulations that impacted their bottom lines. Facebook’s lobbying on the matter was probably driven by its direct interest in the particular provisions of the deal that benefited it. But, much as with other legislation it lobbied on, the TPP would have reverberated far beyond the internet, making medicines more expensive and harder to access for millions of people, insulating banks and other financial firms from regulation, and more. Perhaps Facebook as a company, and Zuckerberg as an individual, have no firm views on those other issues. But corporate politics are about log-rolling: industries get their lobbying priorities passed by agreeing to support the priorities of other industries. And a President Zuckerberg, as the steward of the multibillion dollar company he founded, will have to consider that political reality whenever the business policy agenda is on the table.