Bufetico
The notice from Meta accused Monica Montone of breaking its rules on child sexual exploitation. She was stunned, she said, because nothing she posts comes anywhere near that. The notice arrived last October, and Meta suspended the Facebook and Instagram pages of her gym in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
“Ninety-five percent of my business comes from Facebook,” she told CBS News Philadelphia. Clients found her through local groups, she explained, where somebody would ask who’s a good personal trainer and somebody else would name her. The timing was about as bad as it gets. The gym had only just reopened after a renovation, and she was running the Christmas gift drive she holds every year for local kids in need.
She appealed. There was no number to call at Meta, and its automated systems often went nowhere. She spent more time on it than she should have, she said, and she took her case to the station’s consumer reporters too.
Others got in touch after her story aired. An IT analyst in New Jersey, banned over the same allegation, said he feared he’d end up on a list or get a knock on the door from the police. A teacher in Chicago said his appeal came back denied within minutes, and he was sure no person had handled it. Both had paid for Meta Verified, a subscription that’s supposed to come with direct support, and neither of them got any, they said.
By March the station had heard from dozens of people around the country with almost the same story, and nearly 60,000 people had signed a petition asking Meta for a better way to appeal. The users the station talked to blamed the AI that Meta uses to enforce its rules. Montone chalked it up to a glitch in that AI.
Meta has said AI is central to how it reviews content. In March it said it plans to hand more of that work to more advanced AI over the next few years, once it’s seen the new systems do better than its current methods, and less of it to outside contractors. People, it said, will still play a big part in appeals of disabled accounts. In June, Meta’s Oversight Board, the independent panel that advises it on moderation, said Meta’s account bans lack due process and that people who appeal get little real help.
The Meta that Montone deals with is the business itself: people in a Facebook group, asking who’s a good trainer. Meta’s annual report says nearly all its revenue comes from ads on its apps, sold to reach people like them. Investors see a price, set by the last trade. The value underneath is what the business is worth, and since you can’t see that directly, you estimate it from the cash the business has produced and looks able to keep producing. A small gym gets a price when somebody buys it. Meta gets a new one every second the market’s open, so the difference between price and value can open up fast.
Once a year Meta prints one of those prices on the cover of its annual report: what the shares held by outside investors were worth on June 30. It was $857 billion in 2021 and $378 billion in 2022, less than half, while sales for 2022 came in just 1.1 percent below the year before. The spending jumped. Meta put 68 percent more into buildings and equipment that year, and the price fell as if that money had been thrown away. In 2025 it raised the same spending 87 percent, to $69.7 billion. This time the story was AI, and by June the outside shares were worth about $1.6 trillion.
On spending, the two years look alike. Both times the spending took about six of every ten dollars of cash the business brought in, 62 cents in 2022 and 60 in 2025. At the start of 2025, Meta said most of that year’s spending would still go to its core business, the apps where Montone’s clients found her.
Treating spending as a sure loss is a mistake I know from the inside. My own model once did the same thing to Amazon, counting every dollar the company invested as a dollar lost. So I put any price next to several years of cash from operations, the cash a business collects from running itself, because one year can make a company look like almost anything. And when the cash left after spending drops, I check why. If the company spent more on buildings and machines, the result isn’t in yet. If it made less, the result is already in.
By that test, part of 2022 was already in. Cash from operations fell 12.5 percent that year, from $57.7 billion to $50.5 billion, and that $7.2 billion was about a third of the drop in the cash left after the spending, from $39.1 billion to $19.3 billion. Everything else, in both years, is still an open question, because the spending hasn’t finished producing whatever it’s going to produce, and the price has already changed its mind about it once.
Where this breaks
The dates don’t line up. Meta’s cover figure is from June, and the business numbers cover years that end in December. Measured from December to December, the way Meta’s annual report charts its own stock, the 2022 fall gets deeper and the rise during 2025 comes out smaller than the rise in profit. On that chart the big turn came in 2023, a year Meta spent less on buildings and equipment than the year before. And 2022 was the year the Federal Reserve raised interest rates over and over. The Nasdaq fell that year too, on the same chart, so part of Meta’s fall had nothing to do with Meta.
Profit argues against my reading too. Operating profit, what’s left of sales once the business has paid its own running costs, fell 38 percent in 2022 and rose 20 percent in 2025. Next to that line, the price looks like it was chasing profit, and in 2022 it ran well past it. Spending hits cash the year it’s paid and reaches profit a little each year as the buildings and machines wear out, which is what accountants call depreciation.
Montone’s timing, and Meta’s
Montone’s pages came back after the station interviewed her, and she still didn’t know why they’d been flagged. Meta hadn’t answered the station’s questions about how it enforces its rules and handles appeals. She told the station she was afraid it could happen again.
Meta’s timing is harder to see: in July it raised the bottom of this year’s spending range for the second time, to $130 billion, a figure that also counts payments on some of its leases. At the end of June, $80.3 billion of its buildings and equipment was still under construction, mostly data centers and servers, which is more than it spent on buildings and equipment in all of 2025. Meta doesn’t depreciate a dollar of them until those buildings and servers are put to use, so none of that money has reached the profit line the price was chasing. The same calendar helped the profit that rose 20 percent in 2025. In January of that year Meta finished a review of how long its servers and network equipment last, and gave most of them a longer life on its books. That alone took $2.92 billion off the year’s depreciation.