WHEN IT COMES to many politicians and social media apps like Facebook, there’s a give and take: They take shots at the tech behemoth, and they also give the company money.

That was the case with Gov. Maura Healey, who was on stage in Cambridge last month with Kara Swisher, a chronicler of Silicon Valley now out promoting her new book. Both of them took shots at Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who Swisher calls “most damaging man in tech.”

But Facebook is still where people spend time, and to get their attention, politicians and the media, which as an industry has its own issues with the social media giant, feel compelled to keep their flags planted there. That’s likely why Healey’s political arm has a campaign-style ad running on the platform, touting the $1 billion tax relief package she signed into law last year.

A review of publicly available information on the ad campaign, which started on March 19, shows Team Healey has spent roughly $2,500 to run the ad on Facebook, which allows advertisers to target ads based on age, gender, and location. During Healey’s 2022 campaign for governor, the team spent nearly $14,000, through a vendor, on Facebook advertising.

The ad has run up between 300,000 to 350,000 impressions, though one person can view an ad multiple times. The ad is also running on Hulu and YouTube. A breakdown of spending on those platforms was not immediately available, though Healey’s monthly filing with campaign finance regulators showed $50,000 total spent on “advertising.” 

“This tax season everybody’s gonna benefit from the Healey tax cuts. Saving money for seniors, families, and businesses,” the voiceover declares in the ad, which was first reported by Politico. If you include the economic activity generated by advertising touting the benefits, that list includes Mark Zuckerberg, too.

West End ghosts

Joe McDonald was 12 years old when he and his family were forced to leave Boston’s West End as the Boston Redevelopment Authority – known nowadays as the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) – moved to demolish the area in the late 1950s. Luxury housing and government buildings displaced working-class immigrant families. McDonald’s father, a state worker and devotee of the Irish ward boss who once ruled the area, “never really reconciled to it,” the son recalled.

Earlier this week, McDonald, now 83, stood behind the West End’s last surviving tenement as Mayor Michelle Wu took another big step in her campaign to kill off a quasi-public agency she says has let developers run roughshod over neighborhoods for decades with too little public accountability. At the site, she signed an ordinance that shifts planning and zoning, development review and urban design from a quasi-public agency to a city department.

During the ceremony, one name went unmentioned: Jerome Rappaport, the late developer-turned philanthropist who took advantage of his City Hall connections and worked with the BRA on the neighborhood’s obliteration.

He did end up distributing his largesse, with his charitable foundation notably funding a fellowship program. More than a decade ago, one of its fellows landed an internship in Mayor Tom Menino’s office, and Rappaport advised her on her first run for political office in 2013, which led to her 2021 election to the top job in City Hall.

By most accounts, Rappaport never publicly expressed regret for his role in the demolition of the old West End neighborhood, replaced by the high-end housing his company built there. But it turns out his public service fellowship program helped launch the political career of a Boston mayor who is now looking to end the kind of power structure that let him do what he did.

GOP Senate candidates may not be on Trump train 

Amy Carnevale, a two-time Trump delegate who took the reins of the Massachusetts Republican Party last year, has said she wants to build a “big tent” operation with room for Republicans of varying stripes. She may be getting that – and a bit more. 

In the run-up to last month’s presidential primary, the Mass. GOP chair told WBUR the party would get behind Trump as the nominee this fall. “At the end of the day, the Republican Party of Massachusetts would like to see a Republican elected President and Joe Biden not continue to serve another term, so we will support the Republican nominee,” Carnevale said.   

The party may support Trump, but what if the top GOP candidate on the Massachusetts ballot this fall does not? Awkward. 

For months, Republicans had been fretting about finding a candidate to take on Sen. Elizabeth Warren this November. Now they may have two. But neither one is pumped to jump on the Trump train. 

Crypto lawyer John Deaton, who launched his campaign for Senate in February as an up-from-nothing champion of the little guy, said he will not support Trump. “Just like every other American, I’m severely disappointed in the choices we have for president,” he said in an interview at the time of his announcement. 

This week, Quincy City Councilor Ian Cain formed a federal campaign committee in advance of his expected Republican campaign launch later this month. He has deflected questions about the national party, but Cain, the first Black person and first openly gay candidate elected to office in Quincy, seems unlikely to be waving the MAGA banner. 

Cain was a registered Democrat who then switched to unenrolled before changing his registration to Republican in February. He recorded an ad for Joe Kennedy’s 2020 Democratic primary run for Senate against Ed Markey, endorsed Boston’s liberal mayor, Michelle Wu, in 2021, and made donations in 2022 to two big-name statewide Democratic candidates, Andrea Campbell, who was elected attorney general, and Kim Driscoll, who was elected lieutenant governor.