It is not your phone.
It is a
business model.
Nobody built the feed to hurt you. They built it to sell you. Once you can see the machine, you cannot unsee it, and it stops working on you the same way.
Four companies. Almost one source of money.
These are not estimates and they are not from a news article. Every figure below comes from an annual report the company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, signed by its own executives, under penalty of law.
- Meta
- 97.6% $196.2B of $201.0B in 2025 revenue came from advertising.1
- 94% $2.06B of $2.20B in 2025 revenue came from advertising.2
- Snap
- 87% $5.19B of $5.93B in 2025 revenue came from advertising.3
- Alphabet
- 73% $294.7B of $402.8B in 2025 revenue came from advertising.4
Read that again. You are not the customer of any of these companies. You have never paid them. Somebody else pays them, and what they pay for is access to you.
How the machine turns an hour into a dollar.
There is no single algorithm. Instagram says so itself: “Instagram doesn’t have a singular algorithm. We use a variety of algorithms, classifiers, and processes, each with its own purpose.”5 That sounds like a defense. It is actually a description of an assembly line. Here is the line.
- 01
Intake
Everything you do is measured. The Federal Trade Commission studied nine major platforms and found they each tracked between 5 and 135 distinct measurements of user behavior, an average of 28 per company.6 Not what you post. What you pause on.
- 02
Prediction
Those measurements train a model whose job is to guess what you will react to next. Engineers on Facebook’s own ads team published the reason plainly: “Online advertising allows advertisers to only bid and pay for measurable user responses, such as clicks. As a consequence, click prediction systems are central to most online advertising systems.”7
- 03
The auction
Every slot in front of your eyes is sold, in the fraction of a second before it loads. Google’s own documentation describes the pricing machinery: “Ad Rank is a set of values that are used to determine whether your ads are eligible to show and if eligible, where on the page your ads are shown.”8 Your attention has a live price. You have never seen it.
- 04
The loop
More time means more slots, and more measurements to sharpen the next prediction. The FTC put the incentive in writing: these companies “generally have an interest in serving content that drives User Engagement, because it can lead to more time on the service and greater advertising revenue.”9
- 05
Payout
The money leaves at the back. Meta reports what it calls average revenue per person. Worldwide, in 2025, that figure was $57.03, up fifteen percent in a single year.10 The company got better at this while you were using it.
We did not have to interpret anything.
You do not need a theory about this. Attorneys general, a former engineer under oath, and the companies’ own filings describe the same machine in almost the same words. Two of the three quotes below are allegations in an active lawsuit, which means they are claims a court has not yet ruled on. We say so, because that is the rule here.
“Meta’s core business model across its Social Media Platforms is monetizing user information and attention by increasing engagement, otherwise known as time spent, on its Platforms.”41 state attorneys general, complaint filed October 2023, paragraph 54. An allegation.11
“TikTok’s business model is to increase advertising revenue by maximizing young users’ engagement. The more time young users spend on the platform, the more ads they can be served.”New York Attorney General, complaint filed October 2024, paragraph 49. An allegation.12
“The longer they keep ’em, the more money they make.”Arturo Bejar, former Facebook and Instagram engineering director, sworn testimony to the United States Senate, November 2023.13
Your mother is inventory too.
This is the part that makes the campaign make sense. The machine does not check your age before it prices you. It runs on everyone in the building. Every adult who tells you to put your phone down is standing in the same line you are, and most of them have never once looked at the price tag.
- Teens are priced as adults
- The FTC studied nine platforms and reported that no company treated data collected from a user known to be aged thirteen to seventeen differently from an adult’s.14 There is no youth tier. There is one machine.
- They could tell, and did not look
- The FTC found some platforms’ own systems could identify users likely aged thirteen or fourteen, and the companies chose not to act on it. The FTC’s own word for this is willful blindness.15
- Where you live changes your price
- Reddit reports $10.79 of revenue per user in the United States and $2.31 per user across the rest of the world.16 Same app. Same scroll. Your attention is worth roughly 4.7 times more than someone else’s, because advertisers here pay more to reach you.
- The under-eighteen line item
- Researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health modelled US advertising revenue earned from minors across six platforms in 2022 and estimated nearly $11 billion in a single year, of which over $2 billion came from children aged twelve and under.17 This one is a model, not a disclosure, and we flag that every time we print it.
Meet the Hog.
A business model is hard to be angry at. So the crew gave it a body. The Hog is a machine, not an animal and not a man. It eats hours at the front and drops coins at the back. It is not clever and it is not evil. It is efficient, which is worse.
The Hog is not a person. It has no name behind it, no chief executive, no face. If a poster in this campaign ever points at a human being, the poster is wrong and it comes down. The target is always the machine. That rule is not decoration. It is the only thing keeping this campaign honest.
- The snout
- Intake. Wide, indifferent, always open.
- The eyes
- Glass. There is nobody behind them.
- The drawer
- Where your hour comes out as a number.
- What it never eats
- Anything you did not give it while it had your attention.
Four things the enemy is not.
Naming the wrong enemy is how a campaign like this fails. It feels satisfying and it changes nothing. So we hold the line on all four of these, on every wall, every week.
Not the enemy
- Your phone. It is a radio. Nobody is fighting a radio.
- You. Not your habits, not your hours, not your self-control.
- Any individual person, executive, teacher, or parent.
- A law, a rule, or a policy. Those are somebody else’s wall.
The enemy
- The business model that treats a young person’s time as inventory to be sold.
- The design decisions that model pays for.
- The silence about the price.
None of this is your fault. All of it is on purpose.Cleared campaign line
The strongest arguments against us.
If a smart adult wants to take this page apart, here is where they will start. We would rather hand you the objections than have you meet them cold in a hallway.
- “Serious researchers disagree with you.”
- About a different claim, and they are worth reading. Psychologist Candice Odgers argues the evidence does not support the popular story that these apps are causing a youth mental health crisis, and Amy Orben’s large-scale analyses find the measured effects on wellbeing are very small.18 We agree that fight is unsettled, which is exactly why this campaign never makes that claim. Everything on this page is about how the money moves. That part is not in dispute. It is in the filings.
- “The companies have made real changes.”
- They have, and they say so with numbers. Meta reports that its nudity protection feature is on by default for teens and that ninety-nine percent of people have left it on, and that in June 2025 alone teens blocked accounts a million times after seeing in-app warnings.19 Take that seriously. Then notice that not one of those changes touches the revenue line. Safety features are additions. The business model is the foundation.
- “Your ninety cents an hour is made up.”
- Partly, and we publish exactly which part. The revenue is reported. The user count and the hours are our estimates, because Meta stopped disclosing regional user counts. It is an order of magnitude, not an invoice. The whole derivation is on The Receipts. Attack it there and we will reprint the wall.
- “A jury has not decided any of this.”
- Correct on the lawsuits, and one has now started to. The attorneys general filings are allegations. In March 2026 a jury in the first of these trials found Meta and YouTube negligent and found they failed to warn, awarding $6 million; Meta has said it will appeal.20 One verdict is not a settled body of law and we will not pretend otherwise.
- “This is just anti-technology panic.”
- Then we are doing it wrong. We are not asking anybody to delete anything. There is no pledge, no lockbox, no log. We are asking one question: do you know what your hour sells for? Knowing the price is not panic. It is literacy.
Primary sources only.
Not one claim on this page rests on a news article about a study. Open these yourself. If a number here does not match what you find, that is a mistake and we want it.
Notes. 1. Meta 10-K, fiscal year 2025, revenue $200,966M, advertising $196,175M. 2. Reddit 10-K, fiscal year 2025. 3. Snap 10-K, fiscal year 2025. 4. Alphabet 10-K, fiscal year 2025. 5. Instagram, “Instagram Ranking Explained”. 6. FTC staff report, 11 September 2024. Company data covers 2019 and 2020. 7. He, X. et al., “Practical Lessons from Predicting Clicks on Ads at Facebook,” ADKDD 2014, ACM Digital Library. This paper documents click prediction. It does not claim time spent is the target, and we do not say it does. 8. Google Ads Help, “About Ad Rank”. 9. FTC staff report, page 63. 10. Meta fourth quarter and full year 2025 results. Family average revenue per person, worldwide. 11. Multistate complaint, N.D. Cal., 24 October 2023, paragraph 54. Filed by a coalition of state attorneys general. Unproven allegations. 12. New York complaint, 8 October 2024, paragraph 49. Unproven allegations. 13. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing transcript, 7 November 2023. 14. FTC staff report, page 26. 15. FTC staff report, page 73. 16. Reddit 10-K, fourth quarter 2025 average revenue per user. 17. Raffoul A, Ward ZJ, Santoso M, Kavanaugh JR, Austin SB, PLoS One, 27 December 2023. A simulated revenue model, not company-disclosed revenue. It combines census data, survey estimates of platform use by age, and third-party usage data, and assumes revenue per minute is constant across ages. 18. Candice Odgers, University of California, Irvine. On effect sizes, see also the exchange in Nature Human Behaviour. 19. Meta newsroom, July 2025. Meta’s own reported figures. 20. Verdict in the first bellwether trial, Los Angeles County Superior Court, 25 March 2026, reported by The Guardian and NPR. Under appeal.
Rate: Meta US & Canada revenue, Q2 2025 through Q1 2026, totalling $92.67B (Meta Q1 2026 earnings presentation, revenue by user geography), divided across an estimated 270 million North American users and roughly 383 hours per user per year. The user count is our assumption. Meta stopped publishing regional user counts, so this number is an estimate and we say so every time we print it.
Now go find out what your hour sells for.
Seeing the machine is step one. Step two is a number with your own handwriting on it. Run your receipt, print it, and put it on a wall where an adult has to read it.