[shubhamjain]

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 includes the effects of the implementation of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act during the third quarter of 2025. Absent the valuation allowance charge as of the enactment date, our full year 2025 effective tax rate would have decreased by 17 percentage points to 13%, compared to the reported effective tax rate of 30%.

[1]: https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...

[TYPE_FASTER]

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/

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/1326801/0001...

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]

>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?

[ovi256]

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]

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.

[terminalshort]

There is no real concept of sources legitimately disagreeing here. There is tax law, which Meta uses to calculate its tax liability, and then there are lies.

[kccqzy]

Even if you mistakenly calculate the rate on revenue, you will get 25474/200966=13%.

[abeppu]

I think it's from this: https://itep.org/meta-tax-breaks-trump-mark-zuckerberg/

[shubhamjain]

The post seems to be comparing quarterly figures for tax with annual profit. The doc they cite clearly $25B as provision for income tax.

[datsci_est_2015]

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).

[DoctorOetker]

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]

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.

[datsci_est_2015]

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).

[kadabra9]

I'm shocked, absolutely shocked that a Bluesky post would be deliberately misleading to push a narrative that we need more taxes.

[stetrain]

I don't know why that's specific to one social media network. I see deliberately misleading posts on all of them.

[randomtoast]

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]

There is another possibility. “Source?” is a low effort comment, but GP’s is not.

[Taek]

It's more likely your attitude rather than your quest for verification that gets you downvotes.

[terminalshort]

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]

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.