The Sept. 26 Washington Post reports that

Facebook is forming a political action committee, strengthening ties of the social networking giant with Washington politicians as the company also faces growing questions about how it handles users’ privacy.

Facebook’s PAC “will give our employees a way to make their voice heard in the political process by supporting candidates who share our goals of promoting the value of innovation to our economy while giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected,” spokesman Andrew Noyes said in a e-mailed statement.

A similar report in Search Engine Journal spells out a conspicuous silence among most articles on this news: "it remains unclear which races or candidates Facebook’s PAC will support during the upcoming elections."

I plan to watch this closely to see who FB ends up backing in 2012. (Recent hires mentioned among these articles suggest a Republican tendency.) In the meantime, we are left with a close reading exercise to decode the above-quoted rationale given by FB muckymucks for forming their PAC. In the polarized partisan context of US politics, what does "innovation" signify? Or "power to share"? Or "connected"?

I am not ruling out the possibility of deleting my Facebook account based on how this plays out. I'm increasingly unnerved by what I read about FB's handling of personal data -- not to mention a bit miffed by the latest, meta-schizoid re-design.