Stefan Mileschin

We will withdraw investment if you don’t do what you are told.

Facebook threatened to pull investment projects from Europe and Canada if lobbying demands from COO Sheryl Sandberg were not met.

According to Business Insider, Canada immediately surrendered. According to the Observer, Facebook has also been targeting politicians around the world.

Former UK chancellor, George Osborne, has been promised investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them into lobbying on Facebook's behalf against data privacy legislation.

Details of the lobbying were found in a leak of internal Facebook documents. The documents, which have been seen by the Observer show a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU.

The documents were found in a court case against Facebook by the app developer Six4Three in California.

It shows that Sandberg considered European data protection legislation a "critical" threat to the company. A memo written after the Davos economic summit in 2013 quotes Sandberg describing the "uphill battle" the company faced in Europe on the "data and privacy front" and its "critical" efforts to head off "overly prescriptive new laws...."

https://fudzilla.com/news/48260-face...ope-and-canada