ABC reported that Facebook creators posting racist, conspiratorial, and otherwise inflammatory material are earning money through Meta’s content monetization program, which pays for performance on public posts. Much of the reaction focused on the headline, which originally sounded like Meta was directly commissioning this content. Most people landed on a sharper framing: Meta is not hiring extremists to make posts, but it built a machine that amplifies high-engagement outrage and then pays the accounts that win inside that machine. The distinction mattered legally, but not much morally or operationally.
That led to the real point. Once a platform invites creators into a monetization program, ranks content for engagement, and knows what kinds of posts reliably spike engagement, “we only automate eligibility” stops sounding like a defense. People treated the invite-only detail as especially damning because it makes the payout stream feel less like ambient ad sharing and more like an intentional business relationship. Others pushed back that the article was overstating intent, and that the actual failure is simply that Meta does not exclude these accounts from monetization. Even that narrower version still left the same conclusion: if rage, tribal signaling, and controversy are what the system boosts, then rage creators are not an accident. They are the output.
The broader mood was exhausted rather than surprised. Many described Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, and YouTube as variations of the same engagement machine, with Meta getting singled out here because it still has unmatched reach into local groups, schools, events, messaging, and
Marketplace. That lock-in was the other strong theme. Plenty of people say they hate the feeds, but still keep accounts for apartment listings, kids’ school updates, community groups, artist promotion, or local buying and selling. So the practical problem is not just bad content. It is a network-effect utility that has become hard to leave while steadily filling itself with
slop, outrage, and personalization designed to keep users reacting. The end position was clear: the fight is less about whether offensive speech should exist online and more about whether platforms should algorithmically amplify it and cut the creators a check for doing it.
abc.net.au