MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA (The Daily Whatever Press) — Meta has a program that pays people for Facebook posts that get engagement, and according to a new investigation, at least 29 of the accounts enrolled in it have a history of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. Libs of TikTok is in it. So is StoneToss. So are Benny Johnson, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Jack Posobiec, and Turning Point USA.

Fantastic.

The report comes from Hope Pisoni at Uncloseted Media, an independent LGBTQ outlet, in partnership with The 19th. It was published October 14, 2026, three weeks before an election in which the Republican closing argument is, as far as I can tell, trans kids, trans kids, and gas prices aren’t as bad as you think they are, you stinky hippie.

The reporters didn’t need a whistleblower. They used the Meta Monetization Archive, a searchable database built by a Dutch tech-accountability nonprofit called What To Fix, which has spent two years cataloguing the more than 18 million accounts it has found in Meta’s monetization programs. Every account in the story was still enrolled as of September 15.

Subscribe now

How the money works

The program is called Facebook Content Monetization. Meta launched it in 2024. It’s invite-only, and it pays creators based on engagement. There’s also a “breakthrough bonus” that advertises up to $5,000.

Engagement means reactions, comments, shares. And as Jason Hong, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, told the reporters: “We know that things that get people really angry get a lot of engagement.”

So Meta built a machine that pays you for making people angry, and then invited the angriest people it could find.

Huh. Weird. It’s almost like it’s trying break our society or something…?

The report quotes a September 14 post from Libs of TikTok asking a high school near Seattle why its profile photo displayed a “mutilation flag.” That’s what Chaya Raichik calls the Pride flag. The report also cites reporting from NBC News and The Washington Post linking more than 80 violent threats against schools and businesses to Libs of TikTok posts. Threats. Against schools. Against fucking schools.

In early October, Benny Johnson told his followers that Democrats would “transition your kids while you’re at work.”

That’s the content. That’s what qualifies for the check. Not rainbows or bunnies, or Humans of New York, but people who spew lies about forced gender transitions on kids. What the actual fuck, Facebook?

Meta wrote itself a permission slip

None of this is an accident, because Meta spent 2025 clearing the road.

On January 7, 2025, Meta rewrote its hateful-conduct rules. The new text reads, verbatim: “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.” Meta explained that this was to make room for “political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.” That same day, Mark Zuckerberg announced he would drop third-party fact-checking in the United States. The fact-checkers were gone by April 7, 2025.

Now the punch line. Meta’s own monetization policy says it won’t pay for misinformation, and it defines misinformation as “content that has been rated false by a third-party fact checker.”

Meta fired the goddamned fact-checkers.

So nothing can be rated false. So nothing counts as misinformation. So the money flows. It’s a closed loop, and they built it on purpose.

It gets better. Meta’s monetization rules also say “political and government entities are ineligible.” The report found at least eight official Republican Party pages in the program anyway, including the Republican Party of Georgia. And Robby Starbuck, one of the 29, isn’t just a creator Meta pays. In August 2025, Meta hired him as an adviser on AI bias.

Meta did not respond to Uncloseted Media or The 19th. I’ll be fair here: being enrolled in the program doesn’t prove how much any one account was paid, and the report doesn’t give dollar figures for the named accounts. But Meta could clear this up in an afternoon by publishing the payouts. It hasn’t.

Stop me, oh, stop me if you’ve heard this one before

I came of age during the AIDS years. I remember when calling gay men sick was the respectable mainstream opinion, delivered from pulpits and on the evening news while the people I knew got actually sick and the government shrugged. Back then the bigots worked for free. Now a trillion-dollar company cuts them a check based on how many people their posts reach.

Thanks for stopping by!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every Friday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

Facebook Found a Way to Make Homophobia…