u/LightVapor

An investigation from Australia’s ABC News found that Meta has been paying self-avowed neo-Nazis to post on Facebook, funneling money to accounts that appeared to clearly violate the platform’s own hate speech policies through its invitation-only “Content Monetization” program. One recipient, Hugo Lennon, a known far-right agitator and white nationalist with ties to neo-Nazi groups, has received Facebook payments since September 2025 despite being a well-documented figure who was previously removed by police for hurling racial abuse at India’s prime minister Narendra Modi at a Melbourne hotel and is believed to have helped organize an anti-immigration march on a sacred Indigenous site last year. The Facebook page for Australian white supremacist site The Noticer has similarly been monetized since November 2025, a fact made more striking given that even X, under Elon Musk, has banned The Noticer for violating its own “hateful profile policy.”

Facebook’s monetization program is lucrative at scale, having paid out nearly $3 billion to 16 million accounts in 2025, though the exact earnings of these specific pages remain unclear, according to data collated by the tech accountability nonprofit What to Fix. What to Fix executive director Victoire Rio argued Meta bears direct responsibility given its financial relationship with these creators, saying “if we consider that Meta is in a direct commercial relationship with its publishers, insofar that they’re paying them royalties and that they have a monetization agreement with them, then you could argue that they are liable for the content that gets produced by their business partner in some ways.” Right-wing extremism researcher Kaz Ross added that the underlying incentive structure rewards exactly this kind of content, noting Meta’s “financial model is to reward content creators who get engagement, and as we know, the best way of getting engagement is to produce rage bait, extremist material, aggravating material.”

The revelations align with Meta’s broader retreat from stricter content moderation, which loosened shortly before President Trump’s second inauguration, particularly around gender identity and immigration, two issues frequently exploited by far-right accounts. Meta hasn’t addressed questions about the specific pages it paid, instead issuing a statement arguing “it is important to distinguish between speech that is offensive and content that could potentially lead to offline violence,” adding that “such speech may be offensive to many, but it is not Meta’s role to police offensiveness.”

This is the great burning (3 kinds of heat) question I've had from the pilot.