The Lacuna Project

lacuna (n.) a gap in a record where something should be

Independent research. Not affiliated with any government, agency, or company.

Company

Meta Platforms, Inc. (Facebook, Instagram)

Documented money flows

Findings that rest on exhibits naming this entity

  • POL-3.1: Meta's annual reports state that substantially all of its revenue comes from selling advertising, and its 2017 report lists decreased user engagement and time spent as a risk to that revenue. Advertising revenue was $39.9 billion in 2017, $55.0 billion in 2018 and $160.6 billion in 2024.
  • POL-3.2: In January 2018 Adam Mosseri announced that Facebook would prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people in News Feed. The company's 10-K for 2017 said it expected the change to reduce time spent and some measures of user engagement.
  • POL-3.3: Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, told a Senate subcommittee in a written statement of 4 October 2021 that the company's choices produced "a system that amplifies division, extremism, and polarization" and that its internal research confirmed the problems. Facebook's vice president of integrity had said in May 2020 that the company took steps against polarization, some at a cost to revenue, and Zuckerberg said on 5 October 2021 that the profit-over-safety claim was untrue.
  • POL-3.4: News reports of internal Facebook documents state that staff warned in 2018 and 2019 that ranking changes rewarded outrage and that company leaders declined some proposed changes. Facebook disputes these accounts.
  • POL-3.6: Twitter's own audit found that the mainstream political right was amplified more than the mainstream left in six of seven countries and found no evidence that algorithms amplify extreme groups more than moderate ones. An analysis of 208 million U.S. Facebook users found that ideological segregation rises from potential exposure to engagement, and that most misinformation identified by Meta's fact-checking program sat in a homogeneously conservative corner with no liberal equivalent.
  • POL-3.8: In randomized experiments run with Meta during the 2020 election, switching users to chronological feeds, removing reshares, reducing exposure to like-minded sources and deactivating accounts changed what users saw and produced no significant change in polarization.
  • POL-3.11: Whether engagement-optimizing ranking causes lasting polarization, as distinct from what it amplifies and what users see, is unresolved in the peer-reviewed record.
  • INF-4.1: FBI, DHS and ODNI officials met regularly with platform staff about election content from 2017 and 2018, under the Trump administration, and the meetings continued through the 2022 midterms under the Biden administration.
  • INF-4.2: The FBI agent who ran the Bureau's platform contacts testified, from recollection, that about half of the items the FBI flagged led a platform to act under its terms of service. Twitter told a court in 2023 that its employees reviewed the FBI's flagged tweets independently.
  • INF-4.3: CISA's head of its misinformation team testified that CISA forwarded election officials' reports about posts to platforms in the 2020 election, and the record differs on whether it did so in 2022. The district court wrote in 2023 that no evidence produced in the case tied the Trump administration to the switchboarding, and a 2025 Senate Commerce majority report dates DHS's election-disinformation task force to March 2018.
  • INF-4.5: Meta (26 August 2024) and Alphabet (23 September 2025) each wrote to the House Judiciary Committee that senior Biden administration officials pressed them in 2021 over COVID-19 content, and each wrote that the company made its own decisions on removal and enforcement.
  • INF-4.6: Google's U.S. table lists 717 court and government requests naming 6,991 items in 2021, mostly for defamation, trademark and privacy, with no misinformation category. Meta's report excludes government reports handled under its Community Standards and lists 3 U.S. items for the first half of 2021 and 21 for the second, and X's report for January to June 2024 has no separate U.S. line in its removal table.
  • INF-4.7: No public dataset states how many government reports to platforms from 2017 to 2024 led to removal, by agency, platform and administration. The only figure in the record is the FBI agent's recollection of about half.
  • INF-4.8: Texas and Florida enacted laws in 2021 limiting platforms' removal decisions. In Moody v. NetChoice (1 July 2024) the Supreme Court vacated both judgments on facial-challenge grounds and wrote that a state may not interfere with private actors' speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance.
  • INF-4.9: California's Office of Elections Cybersecurity stated that it flagged nearly 300 posts to Facebook and Twitter after the 2020 election and that 98 percent were promptly removed for violating the platforms' community standards. The Ninth Circuit held in 2023 that Twitter's compliance with such a flag was optional, and held in 2024 that the content-category reporting provisions of California's AB 587 likely violate the First Amendment.
  • INF-4.10: On 12 August 2024 Commissioner Breton wrote to X's owner that the European Commission would not hesitate to make full use of its toolbox, including interim measures, and on 18 February 2025 the Commission wrote that the Digital Services Act does not regulate speech. The Commission's first non-compliance decision under the Act, against X on 5 December 2025, fined X 120 million euros for blue-checkmark design, its advertising repository and researcher data access, and did not concern the removal of any post.
  • INF-4.12: Executive Order 13925 (Trump, 28 May 2020) was revoked by Executive Order 14029 (Biden, 14 May 2021). Executive Order 14149 (Trump, 20 January 2025) directs that no federal officer, employee or agent engage in or facilitate conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.
  • INF-4.13: The 2026 consent decree in Missouri v. Biden bars the Surgeon General, the CDC and CISA from threatening platforms with punishment unless they remove or reduce protected speech, and records no admission (para. 17). The Ninth Circuit held in O'Handley (2023) that compliance with a California office's flag was optional for Twitter, with no intimation of adverse consequences, and that Twitter's moderation was not state action. Twitter's 2023 brief in Trump v. Twitter, a litigation position, argues that coercion requires the threat of a government sanction and that the FBI's emails were advisory.
  • INF-5.7: Meta's COVID-19 misinformation page states that from 8 February 2021 it would remove the claim "COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured," and states on 26 May 2021 that it "will no longer remove" that claim "in light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19."
  • INF-5.9: FactCheck.org's funding page lists Meta payments of $2,159,207.34 for fiscal years 2017 through 2025 and $104,244 in Meta fellowship grants for fiscal years 2021 through 2023, and states that Meta and Google "neither sought nor was given any control over our editorial decisions." PolitiFact's disclosure page lists Meta and TikTok as organizations that gave more than 5 percent of its revenue in the previous calendar year, without amounts.
  • INF-5.10: On 7 January 2025 Meta announced that it would end its U.S. third-party fact-checking program, saying that "a program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor." Lead Stories, a participating fact-checker, replied that the labels and their consequences "were always 100% under the control of Meta."
  • INF-5.15: On 9 August 2024 the Ninth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of Children's Health Defense's suit against Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, the Poynter Institute and Science Feedback, holding that the alleged harm came from Meta's own policy and that Children's Health Defense alleged no government coercion or agreement. The opinion recites that Meta disabled the group's donate button and barred its ads because it "repeatedly posted content that has been disputed by third-party fact-checkers."

Exhibits naming this entity

  • Exhibit 712 1 February 2018. Facebook, Inc. (SEC filing): Facebook, Inc. Form 10-K for fiscal year 2017
  • Exhibit 713 31 January 2019. Facebook, Inc. (SEC filing): Facebook, Inc. Form 10-K for fiscal year 2018
  • Exhibit 714 30 January 2025. Meta Platforms, Inc. (SEC filing): Meta Platforms, Inc. Form 10-K for fiscal year 2024
  • Exhibit 715 11 January 2018. Facebook (Adam Mosseri, Head of News Feed): Bringing People Closer Together
  • Exhibit 716 4 October 2021. Frances Haugen (U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation): Statement of Frances Haugen, Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security
  • Exhibit 717 27 May 2020. Facebook (Guy Rosen, VP Integrity): Investments to Fight Polarization
  • Exhibit 718 5 October 2021. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook (reported by SiliconANGLE): Mark Zuckerberg's public response to the Haugen testimony, as reported
  • Exhibit 724 28 July 2023. Guess, Malhotra, Pan, Barbera, Allcott, Brown et al. (Science): How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?
  • Exhibit 725 28 July 2023. Guess, Malhotra, Pan, Barbera, Allcott et al. (Science): Reshares on social media amplify political news but do not detectably affect beliefs or opinions
  • Exhibit 726 27 July 2023. Nyhan, Settle, Thorson, Wojcieszak, Barbera, Chen et al. (Nature): Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing
  • Exhibit 727 28 July 2023. Gonzalez-Bailon, Lazer, Barbera, Zhang, Allcott, Brown et al. (Science): Asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on Facebook
  • Exhibit 728 13 May 2024. Allcott, Gentzkow, Mason, Wilkins, Barbera et al. (PNAS): The effects of Facebook and Instagram on the 2020 election: A deactivation experiment
  • Exhibit 740 September 2024. Bagchi, Menczer, Grabowicz et al. (Science eLetters): Social media algorithms can curb misinformation, but do they? (Science eLetter)
  • Exhibit 867 11 September 2024. U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Subcommittee chair Nancy Mace: Letter from Rep. Nancy Mace to President Biden and Vice President Harris regarding Mark Zuckerberg's 26 August 2024 letter
  • Exhibit 1071 16 April 2020; updates 8 February 2021 and 26 May 2021. Meta (Facebook), Newsroom: An Update on Our Work to Keep People Informed and Limit Misinformation About COVID-19 (Guy Rosen; page updated 8 February and 26 May 2021)
  • Exhibit 1079 January 2025 (responding to Meta's 7 January 2025 announcement). Lead Stories: Meta Ends Third-Party Fact-Checking Partnership in the U.S.
  • Exhibit 1080 Page read 10 November 2026; covers fiscal years ending 30 June 2010-2026. FactCheck.org (Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania): Our Funding (FactCheck.org, itemized financial disclosure by fiscal year, FY2010-FY2026)
  • Exhibit 1081 Archive capture of 4 January 2026. PolitiFact (Poynter Institute): Who pays for PolitiFact?
  • Exhibit 1083 March 2026 (survey 3-15 February 2026; data for calendar 2025). International Fact-Checking Network, Poynter Institute: State of the Fact-Checkers Report 2025
  • Exhibit 1084 Page updated October 2026; read 10 November 2026. The Poynter Institute for Media Studies: Major Funders (Poynter's Top Funding Sources)
  • Exhibit 1085 9 August 2024. United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit: Children's Health Defense v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 21-16210 (9th Cir. Aug. 9, 2024)
  • Exhibit 1086 11 February 2021. NPR, via WGBH: Instagram bars Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for spreading vaccine misinformation
  • Exhibit 1087 18 August 2022. Associated Press, as carried by NBC News: RFK Jr.'s anti-vaccine group kicked off Instagram and Facebook
  • Exhibit 1116 29 November 2022. U.S. District Court, W.D. La. (deposition taken by plaintiffs, 29 November 2022; filed 3 March 2023): Deposition of Elvis Chan (FBI San Francisco), Missouri v. Biden, No. 3:22-cv-01213 (W.D. La.), Doc. 204-1
  • Exhibit 1117 12 January 2023. U.S. District Court, W.D. La. (deposition taken 12 January 2023; filed 4 March 2023): Deposition of Brian J. Scully (CISA), Missouri v. Biden, No. 3:22-cv-01213 (W.D. La.), Doc. 209-1
  • Exhibit 1121 10 March 2023. U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit: O'Handley v. Weber, 62 F.4th 1145 (9th Cir. 2023), No. 22-15071
  • Exhibit 1124 1 July 2024. Supreme Court of the United States (Justice Kagan for the Court): Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 603 U.S. 707 (2024) (Nos. 22-277 and 22-555)
  • Exhibit 1132 26 June 2023. House Committee on the Judiciary and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government (majority staff): The Weaponization of CISA: How a "Cybersecurity" Agency Colluded with Big Tech and "Disinformation" Partners to Censor Americans (interim staff report)
  • Exhibit 1133 1 May 2024. House Committee on the Judiciary and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government (majority staff): The Censorship-Industrial Complex: How Top Biden White House Officials Coerced Big Tech to Censor Americans, True Information, and Critics of the Biden Administration (interim staff report)
  • Exhibit 1134 25 July 2025. House Committee on the Judiciary (majority staff): The Foreign Censorship Threat: How the European Union's Digital Services Act Compels Global Censorship and Infringes on American Free Speech (interim staff report, with appendix of exhibits)
  • Exhibit 1137 29 October 2025. Meta Platforms, Inc. (written testimony): Testimony of Neil Potts, Vice President, Public Policy, Meta Platforms Inc., before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation ("Shut Your App ... Part II")
  • Exhibit 1138 26 August 2024. Meta Platforms, Inc.: Letter from Mark Zuckerberg (Meta Platforms) to Chairman Jim Jordan, House Committee on the Judiciary
  • Exhibit 1145 18 August 2021. Meta Platforms, Inc. (Facebook): How We're Taking Action Against Vaccine Misinformation Superspreaders (Meta newsroom)
  • Exhibit 1146 7 January 2025. Meta Platforms, Inc.: More Speech and Fewer Mistakes (Meta newsroom, Joel Kaplan)
  • Exhibit 1149 Data through the first half of 2026; accessed 10 November 2026. Meta Platforms, Inc.: Content Restrictions Based on Local Law (Meta Transparency Center): United States page, FAQ, and CSV download
  • Exhibit 1157 28 May 2020 (published 2 June 2020). President Donald J. Trump: Executive Order 13925, Preventing Online Censorship (85 Fed. Reg. 34079)
  • Exhibit 1160 27 August 2024. Agence France-Presse (via TechXplore): Meta CEO Zuckerberg says US pressure on Covid-19 posts was 'wrong' (AFP, 27 August 2024)