Tech Giants Ramp Up Lobbying In Face of Antitrust Scrutiny (infographic) January 26, 2021 Faced with one of the largest antitrust lawsuits in history, Facebook has ramped up its lobbying expenditure in 2020. According to official filings with the Senate Office of Public Records, the social media giant spent $19.7 million to make its voice heard in Washington D.C. last year, up 18 percent from its 2019 total. According to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, that makes Facebook the biggest corporate lobbying spender in the United States, ahead of fellow tech giant Amazon and telecom conglomerate Comcast. “We’ve been clear that the internet needs updated regulations, which is why we’ll continue voicing our support for new rules that address today’s realities online,” a Facebook spokesman said to the Wall Street Journal in a statement many people would agree with. However, Facebook probably has different regulations in mind than the Federal Trade Commission, which, along with 48 state attorney generals, had sued Facebook in December 2020 for “illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct.”