When Scottish economist Adam Smith, often called the father of liberalism, spoke in the 18th century of the “invisible hand of the market,” he pointed out that by pursuing their own interests, individuals could, without intending to, benefit society as a whole. But Smith also warned that merchants often collude to manipulate the rules in their favor and that the state has a duty to prevent monopolies and provide public goods. Today, we see that, if left unchecked, corporations do exactly what Smith feared: they shape laws, co-opt governments, and manipulate public opinion for their own benefit.
In the face of legislative advances, one sector has stood out in lobbying against regulation around the world: the Big Tech, a select group of multimillion-dollar companies such as Meta (owner of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram), Alphabet (owner of Google and YouTube), Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple—known as the “Big Five”—and others, such as China’s ByteDance (owner of TikTok) or Latin American giant Mercado Libre, and new players in the race for artificial intelligence, such as Open AI.
Together, the tech giants have more impact on all aspects of people’s lives than many governments. However, governments, whose mission is to serve the public, are accountable to citizens and constrained by laws, institutions, and regulations. Big Tech companies, by contrast, exist primarily to maximize profits and are accountable above all to their shareholders. Often those who control these corporations can be counted on one hand.
There is little data on how they act to influence legislation. Today, Big Tech is the sector that spends the most on lobbying in the European Union, where they are required to declare their investments. In 2024, the sector spent €67 million, an increase of 57% since 2020. In the United States, where must also publish their lobbying expenses, they spent $61 million in the same year, an increase of 13% compared to 2023. To open the doors of the Trump administration, companies such as Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft each donated $1 million to the inauguration committee, and their CEOs lined up during the event.
This investigation—which took nine months and covered 13 countries—is led by Agência Pública in Brazil and the Centro Lationamericano de Investigación Periodística (CLIP), together with Cuestión Pública (Colombia); Daily Maverick (South Africa); El Diario AR (Argentina); El Surti (Paraguay); Factum (El Salvador); ICL (Brazil); IJF (Canada); La Bot (Chile); Lighthouse Reports (International); Núcleo (Brazil); Primicias (Ecuador); TechPolicy. Press (US); N+ (Mexico); Tempo (Indonesia); Crikey (Australia), and the support of journalism advocacy organizations Reporters Without Borders (international) and El Veinte (Colombia).
For the first time, a collaborative, cross-border investigation has identified nearly 3,000 lobbying actions carried out before congresses and governments in various countries, which can be accessed in an interactive database. We have also recorded legal proceedings and bills related to the rules of the game in the technology industry.
Learn more about here the lobbying tactics identified in this project and the methodological note.
Making the “invisible hand” of Big Tech visible is a task that the organizations participating in this project consider urgent. For this reason, all of them include a collective notice about the funding they have received from technology companies in the present or in the past. See the complete list.
But how do they operate in the rest of the world?
Big tech companies also have more money than many countries. According to information reported in its financial statements, Alphabet, the owner of Google, had revenue of $350 billion in 2024, which is almost equivalent to Chile’s GDP, three times that of Ecuador, and ten times that of El Salvador. Meta had revenues of $164 billion in 2024, more than three times Paraguay’s economic output. Amazon’s revenues last year were nearly $638 billion, a figure equivalent to Argentina’s GDP.
Their bargaining power is greater in less developed countries, and they know how to use it. In some countries, such as most of Latin America and the global south, including Brazil, lobbying is unregulated, making it even more difficult to track lobbying activities and measure their impact on legislation passed in Congress.
But these hands that shape societies must not remain invisible. This work is done by well-paid professionals who are part of complex operations, internally referred to as “government relations” or “public affairs.” These departments, in turn, hire third parties to act on their behalf, such as law firms or business associations. They invest in ways to build and maintain relationships with authorities, distributing favors; they promote private meetings, pay for trips, happy hours, and after-work dinners; and they forge alliances based on access to their technologies.
For the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), lobbying and influence activities are “actions, carried out directly or through any other natural or legal person, directed at public officials in the exercise of the decision-making process, their stakeholders, the media, or a wider audience, and which aim to promote the interests of lobbyists and influencers in relation to public decision-making and electoral processes.”
Lobbying strategies often go beyond the relationship with public officials and may include campaigns to manipulate public opinion, the press, the funding of institutes or for the production of scientific knowledge.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Facebook executive, describes in her book Careless People how her bosses at the tech company, surprised by their own power and naivety, began negotiating with governments around the world and, driven solely by profit, ended up “growing fast and breaking laws.” The author was ironically paraphrasing the often-mentioned-slogan of Mark Zuckerberg, the main owner of Meta, who instructed his team to “move fast and break things.”
To document how these lobbying operations work, the project The Invisible Hand of Big Tech is publishing three sets of investigations that shed light on how Big Tech has attempted to shape bills and regulations, litigated against governments in the courts, and deployed its influence operations to avoid regulation to mitigate its negative effects on societies and politics; how it has influenced the debate on public information; and what is the environmental impact of data centers, those enormous infrastructures that house their thousands of servers.
Big Tech’s Invisible Hand is a cross-border, collaborative journalistic investigation led by Brazilian news organization Agência Pública and the Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (CLIP), together with Crikey (Australia), Cuestión Pública (Colombia), Daily Maverick (South Africa), El Diario AR (Argentina), El Surti (Paraguay), Factum (El Salvador), ICL (Brazil), Investigative Journalism Foundation – IJF (Canada), LaBot (Chile), LightHouse Reports (International), N+Focus (Mexico), Núcleo (Brazil), Primicias (Ecuador), Tech Policy Press (USA), and Tempo (Indonesia). Reporters Without Borders and the legal team El Veinte supported the project, and La Fábrica Memética designed the visual identity.
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