Mark Zuckerberg has described Meta as a technology platform, a social facilitator, a communication tool and, ultimately, a defender of freedom of expression. The one thing he never describes it as is a media company. This omission is not accidental and is no longer convincing at this point.
Meta is a media company. It publishes content on a scale that no traditional publisher has come close to. Every hour of every day, editorial decisions are made about what appears, what is suppressed, what is amplified, and what is deleted. It generates the vast majority of its income, $164.5 billion in 2024by selling advertising against that content.
The most honest thing Meta can do right now is admit it. It didn’t, and changes to its content moderation policy in January 2025 make the evasion more obvious than ever.
Foreign editorial department
Meta time ended its third-party fact-checking program in January 2025 and replacing it with the Community Notes system, Zuckerberg hailed it as a step toward freedom of expression and away from political bias. This framework deserves investigation.
What actually happened was that Meta transferred its editorial responsibility to its users. Now, the people who will be flagging fraudulent content, adding context, and effectively serving as an editorial corrections desk are the people who post for free on the platform, creating an audience that Meta then monetizes through advertising.
Every media company needs an editorial department. Meta has one. It just doesn’t pay for it.
This is not a minor operational detail. This is the main thing that makes it difficult to defend Meta’s description of itself as a neutral platform. A platform that decides what content is neutral, in what volume, to what audience and according to what rules. This is editorial. The algorithm is the editor. The monetization model is the publisher’s business model. The only meaningful difference between Meta and a traditional media company is that Meta found a way to get its content produced for free by billions of unpaid contributors, and then abdicated responsibility for what those contributors produced.
What the numbers reveal
The structural contrast becomes more apparent when the two figures are held together. In 2024, Meta generated more than $160 billion in advertising revenue. That same year, it paid out nearly $2 billion to creators through various monetization programs. In 2025, that number rises to nearly $3 billion, which Meta estimates is an all-time high and a 35 percent year-over-year increase.
Three billion dollars sounds significant until you compare it to the revenue it helped generate. Content created by creators is what drives people to Instagram and Facebook. This is why advertisers pay to be there. The difference between what creators make and what they get, which is about 1.8 percent of revenue made possible by content, isn’t a rounding error, it’s a business model. The editorial product that drives the entire operation is produced by people who capture a small fraction of the value their work creates.
This is not a complaint about creative pay. This is a description of the structure.
Why etiquette is important
Meta’s reason for avoiding the media company label isn’t aesthetic. It is legal and regulatory. Media companies bear editorial responsibility for what they publish. In the United States, platforms have historically been protected from most forms of civil liability for third-party content under Section 230 of the Communications Act.
That framework has been under pressure for years, and Meta’s actions in January 2025 can be read in part as political posturing ahead of a regulatory environment that will be less sympathetic to the platform’s distinctiveness than previous administrations. Moving content moderation to community-driven systems makes Meta less like a publisher making editorial decisions and more like a neutral infrastructure provider that accepts whatever its users have to say.
The Community Notes model also conveniently transfers responsibility. If a confusing post goes viral on Facebook and no community notes appear, Meta may point to a lack of user correction rather than any failure in its editorial process. Responsibility for what appears on the Platform no longer belongs to Meta in any formal sense. It belongs to the crowd.
What actually matters is the creative economy comparison
The contrast with what is happening elsewhere is instructive. As we recently noted, Substack added 32 million new free subscriptions in one quartergrowth is largely driven by Notes and its own internal discovery engine. The platform receives 10 percent of subscription revenue. The creators keep the remaining 90 percent. Incentives are structurally aligned: Substack earns more when creators earn more.
It really looks like a different model. It is still a platform with editorial infrastructure, recommendations and algorithmic curation. But the business model does not depend on collecting attention to sell to advertisers, while creators receive a portion of the value they create. The relationship between the platform and the publisher is transparent and the terms are stable.
Meta’s model is the opposite of transparent. The algorithm that determines which creators reach an audience is proprietary and subject to change without notice. Monetization conditions are determined unilaterally. Editorial rules, including who can add Community Notes and how those notes are measured, are set by Meta. And revenue sharing between Meta and the creators who create its content is not a negotiated agreement. It’s whatever the meta decides to offer.
What really matters is acceptance
None of this is likely to change in the near future. Meta’s market position, advertising revenue and regulatory position depend on maintaining the platform’s purpose. Accepting being a media company would invite a very different conversation about editorial responsibility, legal responsibility, and what creators owe.
But the conversation is happening anyway, informally, in the decisions creators make about where to spend their time. The growth of platforms with cleaner revenue structures and more transparent editorial relationships is no accident. This reflects a growing awareness among creators that the attention they generate and the content they produce have a specific monetary value, and that not every platform offers the same terms.
Meta is a media company that outsourced its editorial department to unpaid freelancers and then restructured that arrangement so that freelancers now also do the editing. He can continue to describe himself as he likes. The business model speaks for itself.
