Meta has not spent $2 billion on ID lobbying.

That bogus number came from a complete AI slop Reddit post that was later removed.

That’s why the only references you can find to it are from sites like your gadgetreview.com link that repost clickbait without fact checking anything.

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nottorp an hour ago | parent [-]

It doesn't matter what they spent excatly but it's in their direct interest to raise legal moats for competitors. Kind of like what Allegedly Open AI tried with the "AI will kill us all" threats.

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Aurornis an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> It doesn't matter what they spent excatly

If the number didn’t matter then the comment above wouldn’t have led with it to make their point.

The flaw in the original study was that someone started with a premise that Meta was at the heart of this and all spending could be traced back to Meta. They made Claude generate a report but they didn’t read any details, so they didn’t notice that Claude couldn’t access the actual documents. So it started guessing and hallucinating until it came up with the scary number that Meta was spending $2B on lobbying.

The entire premise that Meta is driving this with $2B of lobbying is an AI hallucination.

Reddit obviously is adding login gates to combat AI scrapers.

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nottorp an hour ago | parent [-]

> he entire premise that Meta is driving this with $2B of lobbying is an AI hallucination.

I guess the $2B is hallucination. But it makes sense for them to do the "think of the children" lobby.

	▲	NetMageSCW an hour ago \| parent [-]
		>But it makes sense for them to do the "think of the children" lobby. Why? It seems more like that’s baseless speculation with an agenda.

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Scubabear68 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I disagree a little bit, but only for this reason: the amount matters because it is invariably very, very small compared to the revenue/profit of the company and the impact the lobbying has.

It is shocking what politicians will do for just five or six figure donations to their campaigns.