Mark Zuckerberg has described Meta as a technology platform, a social utility, a communication tool, and most recently a defender of free expression. The one thing he has never described it as is a media company. That omission is not accidental, and at this point, it is no longer credible.
Meta is a media company. It publishes content at a scale no traditional publisher has ever approached. It makes editorial decisions every hour of every day about what gets seen, what gets suppressed, what gets amplified, and what gets removed. It generates the overwhelming majority of its revenue, $164.5 billion in 2024, by selling advertising against that content.
The most honest thing Meta could do right now is admit that. It has not done it, and the January 2025 changes to its content moderation policy make the evasion more visible than ever.
The outsourced editorial department
When Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in January 2025 and replaced it with a Community Notes system, Zuckerberg framed this as a move toward free expression and away from political bias. That framing deserves scrutiny.
What actually happened is that Meta transferred its editorial responsibility to its users. The people who will now flag misleading content, add context, and effectively perform the function of an editorial corrections desk are the same people who post on the platform for free, building an audience that Meta then monetises through advertising.
Every media company needs an editorial department. Meta has one. It just does not pay for it.
This is not a minor operational detail. It is the core of what makes Meta’s self-description as a neutral platform so difficult to defend. A platform that decides what content gets distributed, at what volume, to which audiences, and under what rules is not neutral. It is editorial. The algorithm is the editor. The monetisation model is the business model of a publisher. The only meaningful difference between Meta and a traditional media company is that Meta has found a way to get its content produced for free by billions of unpaid contributors, and then to disclaim responsibility for what those contributors produce.
What the numbers reveal
The structural contradiction becomes clearer when you hold two numbers together. In 2024, Meta generated over $160 billion in advertising revenue. That same year, it paid creators roughly $2 billion through its various monetisation programmes. In 2025, that figure rose to nearly $3 billion, which Meta described as an all-time high and a 35 percent increase year-over-year.
Three billion dollars sounds significant until you compare it to the revenue it helped generate. The content that creators produce is the reason people open Instagram and Facebook. It is the reason advertisers pay to be there. At roughly 1.8 percent of the revenue that content makes possible, the gap between what creators generate and what they receive is not a rounding error — it is the business model. The editorial product that drives the entire operation is being produced by people who capture a tiny fraction of the value their work creates.
This is not a complaint about creator pay. It is a description of the structure.
Why the label matters
The reason Meta has avoided the media company label is not aesthetic. It is legal and regulatory. Media companies carry editorial responsibility for what they publish. Platforms, under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the United States, have historically been shielded from most forms of civil liability for third-party content.
That framework has been under pressure for years, and Meta’s January 2025 moves can be read in part as a political repositioning ahead of a regulatory environment that may be less sympathetic to the platform distinction than previous administrations were. Shifting content moderation to community-driven systems makes Meta look less like a publisher making editorial decisions and more like a neutral infrastructure provider that simply hosts whatever its users choose to say.
The Community Notes model also conveniently transfers responsibility. If a misleading post circulates on Facebook and no community note appears, Meta can point to the absence of a user correction rather than to any failure of its own editorial process. The accountability for what appears on the platform is no longer Meta’s in any formal sense. It belongs to the crowd.
The creator economy comparison that actually matters
The contrast with what is happening elsewhere is instructive. As we noted recently, Substack added 32 million new free subscriptions in a single quarter, with growth driven primarily by Notes and its own internal discovery engine. The platform takes 10 percent of subscription revenue. Creators keep the other 90 percent. The incentives are structurally aligned: Substack earns more when creators earn more.
This is what a genuinely different model looks like. It is still a platform with editorial infrastructure, recommendations, and algorithmic curation. But the business model does not depend on harvesting attention to sell to advertisers while creators receive a fraction of the value they generate. The relationship between the platform and the publisher is transparent, and the terms are fixed.
Meta’s model is the opposite of transparent. The algorithm that determines which creators reach audiences is proprietary and changes without notice. The monetisation terms are set unilaterally. The editorial rules, including who gets to add Community Notes and how those notes are weighted, are determined by Meta. And the revenue split between Meta and the creators who produce its content is not a negotiated arrangement. It is whatever Meta decides to offer.
The admission that would actually matter
None of this is likely to change in the near term. Meta’s market position, advertising revenue, and regulatory posture all depend on maintaining the platform designation. Admitting to being a media company would invite editorial responsibility, legal liability, and a very different conversation about what creators are owed.
But the conversation is happening anyway, just informally, in the decisions creators make about where to invest their time. The growth of platforms with cleaner revenue structures and more transparent editorial relationships is not coincidental. It reflects a spreading awareness among creators that the attention they generate and the content they produce has concrete 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 the freelancers now also handle corrections. It can continue to describe itself however it likes. The business model speaks for itself.
