President Joe Biden

Since so much of Big Tech joined the resistance against former President Donald Trump, it was predictable that so many industry players worked to help his Democratic opponent succeed.

President Joe Biden has deep-pocketed Silicon Valley support. Vox Recode reported that LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (now a Microsoft board member), Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt all had “ambitious” and sometimes “secret” plans to propel Biden into the White House. Hoffman alone was expected to spend $100 million trying to unseat Trump.

Recode reported that Hoffman and Schmidt were pouring millions into reviving the Democratic Party’s digital infrastructure. Hoffman also worked to help left-wing digital media groups posing as journalists defeat Trump’s “brand machine.” Schmidt created OneOne Ventures to invest in political startups teaching the left how to use the data once collected. Meanwhile, Moscovitz concentrated his efforts on Democratic voter turnout.

After Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee, the partisan divide of tech sector donations grew, according to CNBC. Biden received 12 times as much from them as Trump in spite of his criticism of Silicon Valley companies.

According to Vox, Biden’s pick of California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate was also sure to please the tech community. Harris is particularly close to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg who heralded the choice on Instagram.

Like many liberals, Biden has been concerned Big Tech companies don’t do enough to censor Trump. Rather than defend free speech online, Biden demanded Facebook fact-check political ads just before the 2020 election. (Facebook’s fact-checking has proven to be inaccurate and biased against the right). Facebook resisted and said it would protect political free speech. The company eventually reversed course and joined most major social media platforms in banning Trump in January 2021.

Biden also suggested determining if Facebook should be broken up through antitrust laws, and he called for Section 230 to be revoked. He said that he wanted social media companies to be “more socially conscious” and act with “journalistic responsibility.”

His campaign also had close ties to Big Tech, according to The New York Times. One of his closest aides came from Apple, and the Innovation Policy Committee that advised Biden included several employees from Big Tech, including: Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple. Some of them hoped to persuade Biden not to heavily regulate the sector.