I traced $2B in nonprofit grants for Meta and Age Verification lobbying

Over the past several months I've been pulling public records on the wave of "age verification" bills moving through US state legislatures. IRS 990 filings, Senate lobbying disclosures, state ethics databases, campaign finance records, corporate registries, WHOIS lookups, Wayback Machine archives. What started as curiosity about who was pushing these bills turned into documenting a coordinated influence operation that, from a privacy standpoint, is building surveillance infrastructure at the operating system level while the company behind it faces zero new requirements for its own platforms.

The advocacy group that doesn't legally exist The Digital Childhood Alliance presents itself as a coalition of 50+ conservative child safety organizations (later inflated to 140+, though only six have ever been publicly named). It has been testifying in favor of these bills across states. Here is what public records show about its legal status:

DCA's domain was registered December 18, 2024 through GoDaddy with privacy protection and a four-year registration. The website was live and fully formed one day later: professional design, statistics, testimonials from Heritage Foundation and NCOSE staff, ASAA talking points already loaded. This is not a grassroots launch. This is a staging deployment of a pre-built site. 77 days later, Utah SB-142 became the first ASAA law signed in the country.

DCA processes donations through For Good (formerly Network for Good, EIN 68-0480736), which is a Donor Advised Fund. For Good explicitly states in its documentation that it serves "501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations." DCA claims 501(c)(4) status. DCA is classified as a "Project" (ID 258136) in the For Good system, not as a standalone nonprofit. I searched all 59,736 For Good grant recipients across five years, roughly $1.73 billion in disbursements. Zero grants to DCA, DCI, NCOSE, or any related entity. The donation page appears to be cosmetic.

Bloomberg reporters exposed Meta as a DCA funder in July 2025. The Deseret News detailed the arrangement in December 2025. No version of the website, across 100+ Wayback Machine snapshots, has ever disclosed funding sources. Every blog post and testimony targets Apple and Google. Meta is never mentioned or criticized.

Casey Stefanski, Executive Director, spent 10 years at NCOSE as Senior Director of Global Partnerships. Unusually, she never appears on any NCOSE 990 filing as an officer, key employee, or among the five highest-compensated staff. A senior director title at a $5.4M organization for a decade with no 990 appearance suggests either below-threshold compensation, an inflated title, or something else about the arrangement.

NCOSE's own 501(c)(4) structure turns out to be complicated. Tracing Schedule R filings across four years reveals that NCOSE created "NCOSE Action" (EIN 86-2458921) as a c4 in 2021, reclassified it from c4 to c3 in 2022, then created an entirely new c4 called "Institute for Public Policy" (EIN 88-1180705) in 2023 with the same address and the same principal officer (Marcel van der Watt). By 2024 the original entity had disappeared from Schedule R entirely.

$70M+ in super PACs, deliberately fragmented Meta poured over $70 million into state-level super PACs and structured every one to avoid the FEC's centralized, searchable database:

If you maintain software that could be classified as an "operating system provider" under these definitions, start Full dataset, OSINT tasklist, and all processed findings are published with sources embedded in each file: github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings

76 points | by theseusares 1 day ago

10 comments

  • throwaway81523 1 hour ago
    Similar info to the reddit post that's been linked here

    https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...

  • gnabgib 8 hours ago
    There's got to be a better way to share this than:

      - a 16 hour old HN account sharing
  - an 18 hour old github account with
  - a 17 hour old repo
    Where your HN post says "several months of work" but your repo doesn't have months of commits, and claims you started researching... 2 days ago.

    > Research period: 2026-03-11 to present

    [-]
    • cue_the_strings 8 hours ago
      Yeah, a way where they hand you all their personal info for profiling, cyberbullying and threats?
      [-]
      • gnabgib 8 hours ago
        You can run a git repo indefinitely without connecting it to github. Creating anonymous accounts on HN and GitHub doesn't open you to threats.
  • Schmerika 23 hours ago
    Getting a 403 error on their site, but the archive remembers [0] and yeah - that website is wildly sus.

    Lil offtopic: This is interesting stuff on its own, so I don't want to distract from the important discussion. However, OP might want to know: I don't think I've ever seen a new account's first (utterly inoffensive) comment show up [dead] like theirs [1]. (You might need [showdead] on to see that, idk.)

    Anyone have any insight?

    0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20250324144815/https://www.digit...

    1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361290

    [-]
  • productinventor 11 hours ago
    What’s striking here is how much of this is technically public information, yet practically impossible to see without doing the kind of stitching you did. It highlights how “transparency” can exist on paper while the real picture remains buried across dozens of filings and databases.
  • khelavastr 1 day ago
    Fantastic research
  • theseusares 1 day ago
    Findings: https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings...
  • hubrix 18 hours ago
    The real question is why? How does this make meta more money?
    [-]
    • username_taken2 10 hours ago
      I think the automatic answer people have for big corporation - to have more data is usually false. I think they don't care about your data that much. And generally they respect it. They mostly need data to target ads and they have it already.

      I think in case of regulations like this, it would be harder for small players to participate in the market, and thus they would prefer to use Facebook or Instagram instead of opening a website or their own system. The same with cookies alerts, GDPR, DMA, etc. It is not a problem for a large player to implement it, but now creating a fully legal website processing data becomes quite expensive and it is easier to just use a platform provided by a large player.

    • atentaten 17 hours ago
      This is not about making money.
    • hulitu 13 hours ago
      Because it allows them to collect more personal information which is illegal, at least in EU ( for the moment,)
    • rasz 16 hours ago
      Afaik whole scheme started when Australian politicians threatened gambling advertising ban.
  • kurvexa 9 hours ago
    "It's for the kids," they say.

    Yeah, right..

    Damn good work! Love it.

  • d--b 20 hours ago
    Re-posting findings, cause somehow OP's message was downvoted:

    https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings...

  • d--b 20 hours ago
    I sometimes wonder who is insane enough to be behind these schemes.

    I mean what degree of alienation does it require to setup a website that claims to be about an advocacy group for children safety, while it is in fact a fake site for an org funneling lobbying money into passing laws that makes their boss more money. How can they live like this?

    And then I remember the Monsanto lobbyists, the Sacklers' enablers, the cigarette people and the oil lawyers. I guess there is just a ton of people who are natural born minions.

    [-]
    • Schmerika 17 hours ago
      > there is just a ton of people who are natural born minions

      Yeah I think that's kind of it.

      I'd prefer to believe that it's school/culture/religion making people like that... And those are definitely factors.

      However, I personally think that it's probably just more effective, evolutionarily speaking, to not have too many independent thinkers in a tribe.

      The 'funny' part is that we call the people who are naturally resistant to following the herd "neurodivergent" - and then try to medicate them into conformity. As if the herd is doing such a great job right now.