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Where is this figure coming from? According to Meta's press release, the effective tax rate is 30% [1]. > The full year 2025 provision for income taxes include

• randomtoast 8mo ago
  That's why I often ask for "Source?" — because sometimes people seem to make up numbers. However, whenever I do this, I receive a large number of downvotes. Maybe it's not common on HN to back up claims with sources.
  • jannyfer 8mo ago
    There is another possibility. “Source?” is a low effort comment, but GP’s is not.
    • randomtoast 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      • koakuma-chan 8mo ago
        Too brief, minus 10 marks.
      • rohin15 8mo ago
        What benefit do you gain by having an llm write comments on HN? I don't get it.
      • jonas21 8mo ago
        This is also a low effort comment, despite the word count. In contrast, shubhamjain found Meta's earnings release for the specified time period, quoted numbers that appear to contradict the claim, and provided a link to the release. This adds to the conversation, while a comment that says "Source?" or a few paragraphs that can be reduced to "Source?" do not.
    • oskarkk 8mo ago
      IMO putting an important number in your post/comment, and not providing a source for that number, is also kind of low effort. If you verified the number before writing, you already had the source ready and you could just put it in the comment. If you wrote the number from memory, not checking if your memory is correct is low effort (but you can also warn the readers that the number is from memory, that's better). If you're intentionally misrepresenting what the number means in your comment (and giving the source would contradict the meaning of your comment), or just giving a number that "feels right" or a number that you know is wrong, then it's low effort and a lie. I try to verify important numbers and facts in what I read, and seriously, there's so much fake or misrepresented info everywhere, on every political side, that it's depressing, and it makes me don't believe literally anything without a source, unless I verify it myself. Of course when someone provides a source, I often look into the source, and sometimes it turns out that the text misinterpreted/misrepresented the meaning of the source. On Wikipedia, I also check if what is written is actually in the source, because sometimes the editor writes his own opinion while only loosely basing the text on a source (or basing it on nothing). Verification can take some time, and that's the effort passed from the author of unsourced claim to its many readers, unless they just trust it or ignore the claim. When I write anything I try to include sources for important things. If I wouldn't include a source, and someone asked "Source?" I wouldn't think "what an annoying guy", I'd think "oh, I could have linked that in the first place". And I usually upvote "Source?" comments (unless it's a thing that anyone can check in 30 seconds). I usually double-check the facts in what I'm writing, and many times I almost wrote something from memory that wasn't true, but looking for a source saved me from that.
  • Taek 8mo ago
    It's more likely your attitude rather than your quest for verification that gets you downvotes.
    • randomtoast 8mo ago
      My intentions are sincere, maybe it is the wording.
      • brynnbee 8mo ago
        I would imagine it's more you're being skeptical of something that is unpopular to be skeptical about. It's like someone saying climate change is impacting our planet, and then asking "source?" in response.
        • randomtoast 8mo ago
          No, that's not correct. I ask "Source?" when someone makes a claim that goes against popular belief, such as: "climate change is not impacting our planet." I do think "Source?" is generally considered a low-effort response, so it's the wording I guess, not the context.
        • kolbe 8mo ago
          Except he was skeptical about Meta's effective tax rate being 3%. Why are you making up scenarios that aren't real to justify hurting him?
          • loeg 8mo ago
            The user you're defending (randomtoast)[1] isn't the one who expressed skepticism about the 3% claim (shubhamjain)[2]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47167886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47167886 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47167698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47167698
            • kolbe 8mo ago
• abeppu 8mo ago
  I think it's from this: https://itep.org/meta-tax-breaks-trump-mark-zuckerberg/ https://itep.org/meta-tax-breaks-trump-mark-zuckerberg/
  • shubhamjain 8mo ago
    The post seems to be comparing quarterly figures for tax with annual profit. The doc they cite clearly $25B as provision for income tax.
    • abeppu 8mo ago
      I am not an accountant or finance professional but the table they refer to has the 2.8B under "current" and the 25B figure under "total". Is it just that of their 2025 taxes, they paid 2.8B during that calendar year and it's only Feb and the remaining was not yet actually paid out at the time that filing was prepared?
    • TYPE_FASTER 8mo ago
      While they provisioned $25B, the 10-K Meta filed states they paid $2.8B in Federal income taxes for the full year 2025. The amount they provisioned is not limited to Federal income taxes, it also includes state and foreign income taxes.
  • datsci_est_2015 8mo ago
    Interesting. Wouldn’t surprise me if there are different ways to report the same numbers to make the situation seem more or less favorable. Statisticians and accountants are both professional liars (speaking as a statistician married to an accountant).
    • loeg 8mo ago
      > Wouldn’t surprise me if there are different ways to report the same numbers to make the situation seem more or less favorable. Yeah -- accurately, and inaccurately.
• datsci_est_2015 8mo ago
  Yeah this is a weird low quality submission to HN (no offense OP). Microblogging has questionable value for anything beyond “hot takes” and “breaking news” (and keeping people angry and misinformed enough to vote).
• ovi256 8mo ago
  I bet the two sources won't agree on what values go into the denominator and / or numerator of their effective tax rate calculations. It can be as simple as the 3.5% being a calculated rate on revenue rather than profit
  • loeg 8mo ago
    You can't just throw revenue in the denominator, though. Business tax is assessed on income. If you're going to make a claim about tax rate using an unconventional metric, you need to be explicit about what you've done; Reich isn't.
    • gojomo 8mo ago
      If you're Robert Reich, you can! You can make up anything, and someone will submit it to HN to waste everyone's time!
      • MichaelZuo 8mo ago
        I thought there were systems designed to effectively negate users that submit too many misleading posts.
        • latexr 8mo ago
          Your parent post isn’t suggesting it’s always the same user submitting, just that users submit a lot of posts from this person. Can’t say I agree, though. I don’t recall ever having seen one of his posts on HN, and a cursory search suggests they’re not even upvoted that much. Highest I found was under 30 points. But my methodology is flawed, as I basically searched for the name.
      • Refreeze5224 8mo ago
        Yeah, screw Robert Reich! Always looking out for the workers who make up the majority of this country. Why won't he look out for the poor multi-national corporations, who have no one to advocate for them or their tax rates?
• kadabra9 8mo ago
  I'm shocked, absolutely shocked that a Bluesky post would be deliberately misleading to push a narrative that we need more taxes.
  • stetrain 8mo ago
    I don't know why that's specific to one social media network. I see deliberately misleading posts on all of them.
    • akramachamarei 8mo ago
      Sure, but being misleading to push for more taxes is more characteristic of Bluesky than many others.
• DoctorOetker 8mo ago
  If entity A declares such and such incomes and expenses, it could be truthful or not. If entity A is truthfully declaring such and such incomes and expenses, why would it reference it's own declaration as the "reported effective tax rate of 30%". On the other hand if A is not truthfully declaring such and such incomes and expenses, and a legal team is very careful in maintaining an exact wording towards the government, then any tax-related comments by A which are not made by the legal team would either be self-censored or censored by the legal team to never reference "the effective tax rate" but rather a "reported" one, it basically reads like a superscript referring the reader to some other carefully worded fine print in other documents. What prevented the more natural language of "[...] compared to the effective tax rate of 30%." ? Under what circumstances would you add such a word? EDIT: this is not to say that this word constitutes an effective admission of lying, but rather that they don't actually want to talk about it, while pretending to be openly talking about it. EDIT2: whenever companies get away with substantially lower tax rates, employee shortages in the rest of the economy can be seen as low-effective-taxed companies "stealing" employees from the rest of the economy, perhaps with or without approval from the government. If the government approves it is effectively a state-sponsored enterprise, and if it doesn't it would probably like to know about it since productivity of the economy could be improved by reassigning those employees into companies that allow themselves to be properly taxed (whatever that means!)
  • SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
    In the US, public companies generally must report their financial results according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). They can also report other numbers, and that's what they're doing in footnote (1); they think one particular adjustment GAAP requires them to make might be misleading, and they helpfully disclose that they would have calculated 13% if not for that adjustment. But they are not allowed to say that the GAAP number is wrong or untruthful, nor to put the non-GAAP number in the topline and the GAAP adjustment in the footnote.
• terminalshort 8mo ago
  Taxes are a subject of frequent liberal conspiracy theories. You will see all sorts of blatantly false claims like this because left wing misinformation spreaders like Robert Reich make up their own tax calculations that have no relation whatsoever to actual tax law.
  • mrgoldenbrown 8mo ago
    No need to limit this to "liberal" conspiracy theories. Trump and his admin's statements on how tariffs and other taxes work and who pays them have been full of blatantly false claims.
    • akramachamarei 8mo ago
      "X does A" does not mean "only X does A."
      • datsci_est_2015 8mo ago
        It’s a fair retort here, though, where the grandparent comment was clearly trying to grandstand in opposition to his perceived enemy tribe, mostly unprovoked. Edit: in other words, it’s a fair interpretation of the comment to be saying “We wouldn’t have to deal with all this misinformation about taxes if there wasn’t some giant liberal conspiracy”, given that they weren’t replying to any specific part of the parent post.
        • akramachamarei 8mo ago
          Well, no, that is not a reasonable interpretation at all. For one, the commenter did not proclaim existence of conspiracies, but the existence of conspiracy theories. People mix these up a lot. Secondly, the other interpretation you propose exhibits roughly the same form as "X does A", so it's worth repeating that it does not mean "only X does A" either!
          • datsci_est_2015 8mo ago
• TYPE_FASTER 8mo ago
  The effective federal tax rate, and the amount of federal tax Meta paid as a percentage of income, are two different things. More details here: https://itep.org/meta-tax-breaks-trump-mark-zuckerberg/ https://itep.org/meta-tax-breaks-trump-mark-zuckerberg/ The 10-K filed by Meta is linked to in that article, and can be found here: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000162828026003942/meta-20251231.htm#fact-identifier-1133 https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001... If you dig into the details in the Income Tax Disclosure block, Meta paid $2.8B in Federal income taxes for the year ended December 31, 2025. Meta deferred a large chunk of Federal income taxes. So, while the effective Federal income tax rate for 2025 was about 30%, largely due to a 3rd quarter charge of $14B against deferred taxes (Meta's effective tax rate for 2023 was 17.6% and for 2024 it was 11.8%), they paid 3.5% of their income as Federal income tax.
  • gruez 8mo ago
    >Meta deferred a large chunk of Federal income taxes. How are can we reasonably expect them to be deferred for? Are we talking on the order of years, or decades?
    • dahinds 8mo ago
      Mostly never -- most of the deferral was an accounting adjustment for the value of future tax credits that they could no longer take advantage of, so there is no actual tax liability here that will eventually be paid.
    • mcbrit 8mo ago
      A tax deferred is a tax avoided. (common wisdom)