Facebook’s creator funding raises eyebrows at the extreme
Facebook is paying creators who post white nationalist content — but is the real problem Meta's politics, or its broken enforcement model?
The ABC has a legitimate story. Facebook is directly paying creators who publish white nationalist content and anti-vaccination misinformation, through an invitation-only monetisation program that the company itself says requires compliance with its own standards. Those standards prohibit exactly the kind of content some of these creators regularly post. That tension is real and worth reporting.
The mechanism rewards engagement, not a particular ideology
What the ABC investigation does not tell you is whether Facebook is also paying creators who produce equivalently extreme content from the other direction. That is not a small omission. It is the question that determines whether this is a story about Meta platforming a particular brand of extremism, or a story about Meta's monetisation model rewarding engagement regardless of where on the spectrum the rage originates.
The mechanism described by independent researcher who specializes in right-wing content, Kaz Ross is not ideologically selective. The model rewards engagement. Engagement is maximised by content that makes people upset. That logic applies to a creator shrieking about replacement theory just as readily as it applies to one shrieking about institutional racism, police brutality, or — to pick a policy area that produces genuinely heated content in Australia — gender medicine for adolescents. If Meta's algorithm funds one end of the dial, there is no structural reason it would ignore the other.
The What To Fix database used by ABC News Verify is publicly searchable. It catalogues Meta's disclosed publisher payments going back to 2019. Anyone with the time to look could identify whether Australian creators who publish, say, aggressive pro-defund-police content, or graphic advocacy around paediatric gender procedures, are also drawing income through the same program.
The What To Fix database used by ABC News Verify is publicly searchable. It catalogues Meta's disclosed publisher payments going back to 2019. Anyone with the time to look could identify whether Australian creators who publish, say, aggressive pro-defund-police content, or graphic advocacy around paediatric gender procedures, are also drawing income through the same program. The ABC investigation, as published, did not appear to ask that question, let alone answer it.
The omission is not cosmetic — it determines what kind of story this is
That matters for the credibility of the analysis. If the problem is structural — Meta's engagement-maximising incentive structure pushes money towards anyone who can generate heat, regardless of content — then the story is about platform design and the limits of Meta's enforcement. That is a serious and generalisable critique. If the problem is selective enforcement, where Meta allows right-wing extremist content to monetise while applying its stated policies more rigorously to equivalent content on the left, that is a different and also serious story, but one that requires demonstrating the asymmetry rather than simply assuming it.
What To Fix's executive director Victoire Rio gestured at the structural explanation: the enforcement quality is the real issue, not the policies themselves, which exist on paper and are comprehensive enough. Meta told the ABC it applies penalties when creators violate Community Standards, and that repeated breaches lead to removal. The examples the ABC found suggest that enforcement is, at minimum, inconsistent. But inconsistent enforcement is different from directionally biased enforcement.
Meta's scale is real — but scale alone does not explain the pattern
Meta distributed nearly $US3 billion to an estimated 16.2 million monetised accounts in 2025. Sixteen million accounts is an enormous number to police. The accounts the ABC identified as problematic — Hugo Lennon, Monica Smit, The Noticer, March for Australia — are a handful. That is not a defence of paying them; their content clearly tests or breaks the company's own published rules. But it does frame the question. Is this a deliberate strategy to fund the far right, as Dr Ross implies? Or is it a compliance operation that is failing across the board because the scale of the program makes consistent enforcement genuinely difficult?
The honest answer is that the ABC investigation, as published, does not provide enough information to distinguish between those possibilities. A complete investigation would test the program across the political spectrum and report what it found in both directions. If it found the same pattern on the left, the story becomes about Meta's broken enforcement model. If it found the opposite, the selective enforcement story becomes much stronger. Either version is worth writing. The version that only examines one side of the ledger leaves the reader holding half the picture.
Meta's own position is telling in its imprecision: "It is not Meta's role to police offensiveness." That is defensible as a general principle. Nobody wants a platform company deciding what is merely offensive versus what is dangerous, with all the power over political speech that implies. The problem is that Meta's own monetisation policies already make exactly those distinctions. The company wrote the rules. The question is why it is not applying them.
That question deserves a complete answer, not a selective one.
Sources
ABC News — Facebook is paying controversial creators to produce rage-bait content
What To Fix — Meta Monetisation Disclosures Archive
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Facebook's Content Monetisation program?
It is an invitation-only program through which Meta directly pays creators for content they publish on Facebook. Meta says participation requires compliance with its Community Standards, which prohibit misinformation and hate speech.
Why is Meta paying creators who post white nationalist content if that breaks its own rules?
That is precisely the contradiction the ABC investigation surfaces. Meta's stated position is that it applies penalties for Community Standards violations, but the examples identified suggest enforcement is inconsistent — the company's rules exist on paper, but their application appears unreliable at scale.
Does Facebook only fund right-wing extremist creators?
The ABC investigation examined only far-right creators, so the published evidence is one-sided. The underlying engagement-reward mechanism is not ideologically selective — it pays for content that generates strong reactions, which exists across the political spectrum. Whether equivalent left-wing creators draw the same payments has not been reported.
How much has Meta paid out through its creator monetisation program?
Meta distributed nearly $US3 billion to an estimated 16.2 million monetised accounts in 2025 alone. That scale makes consistent policy enforcement across all accounts genuinely difficult, though scale is not the same as an excuse.
What is the What To Fix database?
What To Fix is an independent organisation that maintains a publicly searchable archive of Meta's disclosed publisher payments, going back to 2019. ABC News Verify used it to identify Australian creators receiving payments through the Content Monetisation program.