Meta spent $26.3 million lobbying for "age verification" bills in 45 states. But the bills don't regulate social media. They regulate your operating system.
Someone traced $2 billion in nonprofit grants and lobbying records. Here's what they found:
1. Meta's lobbyist wrote Louisiana's age verification law. The sponsor confirmed it. It forces OS-level surveillance. Meta's platforms? Zero new requirements.
2. Meta covertly funded an astroturf "child safety" group to push these bills nationally. It has no EIN, no incorporation records. It doesn't legally exist.
3. $70M+ into state super PACs, deliberately fragmented across databases to dodge centralized tracking.
4. On every social media bill, Meta fights. On the one bill regulating operating systems, Meta just "monitors."
5. The EU solved this with zero-knowledge proofs. No biometrics. US bills mandate vendors that send your face to third-party clouds.
Meta profits from harvesting data. They wrote laws forcing every device to broadcast your identity through a system-level API. They built the surveillance. They wrote the mandate. They exempted themselves.
Every claim sourced from IRS filings, Senate disclosures, and state lobbying records.
