Big tech companies such as Alphabet (Google) and Meta have revenues far larger than the GDP of whole Latin American countries such as Ecuador, Paraguay and El Salvador. They know how to use this bargaining power: to shape bills and regulations, sue governments in the courts, and use their influence operations to oppose regulation or avoid its effects.
LAB Partner Agência Pública has recently launched a special investigation conducted by 17 journalism organizations from around the world—from El Salvador to Indonesia—to shed light on one of the most powerful forces shaping the world we live in: Big Tech lobbying.
Big Tech’s Invisible Hand is the first transnational investigation led by Agência Pública, with Centro Latinoamericano de Periodismo Investigativo (CLIP). This is a massive effort that took more than a year, from the conception to the hands on – with the research alone taking nine months.
The content can be read in Portuguese on Agêncis Pública’s website, or in English on CLIP’s website. You can see a list of some of the reports here. We coordinated a team of 40 strong journalists who uncovered details of how this mostly under-reported lobby is operating in countries in the Global South.
In the meantime, we learned a lot about how to coordinate a big transnational effort such as this one, involving different newsrooms spanning very different timezones. We learned that the tactics used by Big Tech are very similar across the globe, but they are much more aggressive – and under-reported – in the Global South.
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.
Stories already published detail:
- How Big Tech killed Brazil’s Fake News Bill (PL 2630), the most robust legislation proposed in Brazil to hold them accountable and demand transparency;
- How and why Google hired former President Michel Temer;
- Who are the ‘gov rel’ or public policy executives Big Techs in Brazil;
- How they operate in Latin America through trade associations.
Other stories are coming fresh from:
- Chile (The Revolving Door Minister)
- Colombia (The battle Big Tech won to weaken a regulation that sought to protect children’s mental health)
- Argentina (The AFIP attempted to collect taxes from large technology companies, but Alberto Fernandez’s administration exonerated Mercado Libre)
- Ecuador (Zero Sanctions in Ecuador Due to a Weak Personal Data Protection Law).
This is just the first in a three-part series. The project will publish a set of stories about the ‘goldrush’ of data centers in Latin America, followed by a series about Google’s role in fighting the concept of compensation for journalism.
The Invisible Hand Project
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.
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 here for the complete list.
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.
This article is based on descriptions of the project on Agência Pública and CLIP
Main image: Alejandra Saavedra/CLIP
