Published: 17 September 2025
Who Makes Money From Facebook?
Sanctioned Entities
Violation Type: Sanctions Laws, Meta Monetization Terms
Social media monetization services are subject to applicable laws and regulations as well as platforms’ own monetization terms and policies. In this #WhoMakesMoneyFromFacebook series, we leverage our Meta Monetization Archive to highlight some particularly glaring examples of likely violations.
Facebook is granting access to its monetization services to multiple Facebook pages affiliated with EU and US-sanctioned entities. This is the alarming conclusion we’ve reached through research using our Meta Monetization Archive, a compilation of Meta's partner-publisher lists, which discloses participants in the company’s revenue redistribution programs. The pages we looked at didn’t try to hide their affiliation with US and EU-sanctioned entities. In some cases, they also appear to have been making use of other Facebook monetization features, such as Subscriber Hub or Stars, as identified on their profiles. What, we wonder, is going on here?
Some context on sanctions: As a US company running monetization services out of an Irish entity, Meta (Facebook’s parent company) is subject to US and EU sanction laws. In practice, this means that it is required to comply with the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and EU Sanctions lists, which prohibit the provision of financial and economic resources to listed entities, as well as entities under their ownership and control.
Facebook’s monetization terms reference U.S. economic restrictions and trade sanctions. As of September 2025, however, they still fail to reference EU sanctions, despite the company having otherwise acknowledged applicability.
More to the point, it is not enough for Meta to say that it is complying with sanctions. It needs to actually comply. And while it can be tricky to confirm whether a social media account is affiliated with a sanctioned entity, it is on the company to conduct screenings of its potential monetization partners. This expectation applies even more so when accounts have been formally claimed by sanctioned entities, whether on their official website or through the platform’s own ownership disclosure tools.
And yet…
Our Meta Monetization Archive reveals how numerous pages affiliated with entities sanctioned by the US and the EU have been —and in some cases continue to be— accessing Facebook's monetization services.
Russian state media
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In June 2025, we published our Bankrolling Sanctioned Entities report, which looked at a subset of entities sanctioned by the EU following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Our research established that Facebook maintained active monetization partnerships with verified pages affiliated with Russian-controlled media outlets Sputnik and Russia Today (RT) for months after they were subject to sanctions. Facebook even initiated new contracts and went as far as initiating a new partnership with an account affiliated with RT.
Meta did not deny providing Sputnik and RT with monetization services, but it has yet to clarify whether these entities accrued, and ultimately received, money through its services.
Update: Since publishing our report, we were surprised to find that several of the Sputnik pages we'd highlighted were re-activated into the Facebook In-Stream Ads monetization program. The re-listings took place on 15 July 2025, with all pages eventually de-listed again between the 26th and 29th of August 2025. Their updated monetization history can be accessed here: Sputnik, Sputnik France, Sputnik Italia, SNA (Sputnik Deutschland).
To make matters even more baffling, Sputnik pages are presumably banned globally by Facebook itself, a move the platform took following the inclusion of Sputnik’s parent entity on the OFAC sanctions list in September 2024.
Pro-Russian Influencers
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We’ve also been investigating a couple of the African influencers who were recently sanctioned by the EU for supporting actions or policies attributable to the Russian government.
EXAMPLE: Sylvain Afoua
Known on social media as Egountchi Behanzin, Afoua is a Togolese-French influencer sanctioned by the EU in May 2025 for promoting Kremlin narratives. He is also the founder of the Ligue de Defense Noire Africaine (LDNA), an entity outlawed by French authorities in 2021 for spreading an ideology calling for hatred, discrimination and violence.
Afoua was actively enrolled in Facebook’s In-Stream Ads and Ads on Reels programs until June 2025, when Meta restricted his account’s access following media inquiries linked to our sanctions report.
And yet, as of September 2025, Afoua’s blue-tick page still boasts access to other monetization features. These include Subscriber Hub and Facebook Stars, both of which offer routes for fans to channel money to Afoua by prompting them to “subscribe” or “send a gift”. While it is unclear whether the money accrued through these services is being transferred to Afoua, Facebook’s facilitation of these services may still be regarded as enabling sanctions violations by third parties.
Advertisements, too, continue to run on Afoua’s official page. Facebook is, in theory, earning revenue from advertisers for these ads and would normally redistribute some of that revenue to Afoua in the form of royalties. If that money is not redistributed to Afoua, an EU-sanctioned entity to whom the company is prohibited from channeling funds, then where exactly is that ad revenue going?
EXAMPLE: Nathalie Yamb
Nathalie Yamb calls herself “La Dame de Sochi”, an apparent reference to Russia’s 2019 Africa summit at the Black Sea resort city, which she attended. She was sanctioned by the EU in June 2025 for her promotion of Russian propaganda and her ties to Russian private military companies.
And yet, Yamb remains fully active on Facebook. Her account is easily accessed within the EU, and, crucially, it is still actively listed by the platform as being part of Facebook’s revenue redistribution programs. Facebook also continues to run ads on her content.
Yamb was sanctioned by the EU about two weeks after we published our last sanctions report, which is why we didn’t previously reference her. Her continued presence on Facebook and apparent access to monetization services, however, suggest that Meta has not meaningfully improved its sanctions screening process since we put them on notice in June.
You can read more about sanctioned African propagandists in the African Digital Democracy Observatory’s recent report on the subject: Who are the African propagandists on EU’s sanctioned list?
US-sanctioned entities
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It’s not just EU-sanctioned entities successfully gaining access to Facebook’s monetization programs and features. We’re also seeing possible violations of sanctions from the US treasury and Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
EXAMPLE: Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion
The Rapid Action Battalion is Bangladesh’s infamous paramilitary force. It has been described by Human Rights Watch as “notoriously abusive”, and has been sanctioned by the US since 2021 for being “responsible for or complicit in, [and having been] directly or indirectly engaged in, serious human rights abuse”.
Despite being actively sanctioned, the Rapid Action Battalion continues to maintain a lively Facebook presence. Its page was also listed as monetized via the Facebook In-Stream Ads program as of the end of August 2025, although it has since been de-listed (see full monetization history).
Entities in Restricted Countries
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Beyond sanctioning individuals and entities, the US also enforces financial and trade restrictions on entire countries. These have included countries such as Cuba, Iran, Syria, and North Korea.
EXAMPLE: Pages with Admins in Restricted Countries
A search by admin location in our Meta Monetization Archive reveals nearly 300 pages that were onboarded for Instant Articles, In-Stream Ads, and Ads on Reels, despite having most of their admins in a restricted country as of July 2024. The total could be much larger, as we were only able to obtain admin location data for a small subset (approximately 3.65%) of all participating pages before Meta retired its CrowdTangle analytics tool in August 2024. Meta does not currently disclose admin locations in its partner-publisher lists.
EXAMPLE: Ministry of Tourism of Cuba
Among the pages associated with restricted countries, we also found the Canadian regional sub-page of the Facebook page of the Ministry of Tourism of Cuba, a state-affiliated entity. The page is verified by Facebook and linked to on the ministry’s official website. In spite of this, it was cleared by Facebook for participation in its revenue redistribution programs in August 2024, and remains listed as active as of the beginning of September 2025.
Takeaways
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The above list of sanctioned entities gaining access to Facebook's monetization services is by no means exhaustive, and we encourage journalists and researchers working on sanctions to leverage our Meta Monetization Archive for further investigation.
Regardless of whether payments are ultimately being made to these actors, these few examples point to important gaps in the company’s screening processes. If accounts associated with high-profile, explicitly sanctioned entities are able to pass through Facebook’s vetting process and successfully qualify for monetization services, then what does that say about the rigor of the vetting process? And about Facebook’s monetization governance in general?
The concern is also not unique to Facebook. Meta just happens to be the only social media company to disclose the accounts active in its monetization programs. We think that our findings about #WhoMakesMoneyFromFacebook makes an urgent case for requiring monetization transparency across all major social media platforms.
Additional Readings
- Bankrolling Sanctioned Entities: How Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd. May Have Violated EU Sanctions and Channeled Money to RT, Sputnik and Other EU-sanctioned Entities (WHAT TO FIX | June 2025)
- Sanctioned but Thriving: How Online Platforms Fail To Address the Widespread Presence of Entities Under EU Sanction (Science Feedback, Alliance for Europe | December 2024)
- X Provides Premium Perks to Hezbollah, And Other U.S-Sanctioned Groups (Tech Transparency Project | February 2024)
Curious about other pages? We invite you to explore our Meta Monetization Archive. If you publish your findings, please do share them with us. We would love to feature them. Please also make sure to attribute the data to the WHAT TO FIX Meta Monetization Archive.
Note:
We sought comment from Meta on our June 2025 Bankrolling Sanctioned Entities report over a week prior to publication.
On release of the report, on 20 June, we also formally notified Meta of potential violations of EU sanctions relating to Russian media outlets and other entities. Meta did not respond.
Despite not providing us with a response, Meta issued a limited media statement stating: “Being listed on our partner-publisher list is not itself evidence that an account has received payout, and any party that's on that list is still subject to our sanctions controls. Meta is committed to complying with applicable sanctions laws including EU sanctions and continuously takes steps to meet our legal obligations. When we identify accounts that appear to be run by or on behalf of sanctioned parties, we enforce against them.”
We responded publicly to this statement on 1 July 2025, highlighting that it raised more questions than it answered. Meta did not address our response.
We have sought comment from Meta on this present post. As of publication, no response has been received.
On release of the report, on 20 June, we also formally notified Meta of potential violations of EU sanctions relating to Russian media outlets and other entities. Meta did not respond.
Despite not providing us with a response, Meta issued a limited media statement stating: “Being listed on our partner-publisher list is not itself evidence that an account has received payout, and any party that's on that list is still subject to our sanctions controls. Meta is committed to complying with applicable sanctions laws including EU sanctions and continuously takes steps to meet our legal obligations. When we identify accounts that appear to be run by or on behalf of sanctioned parties, we enforce against them.”
We responded publicly to this statement on 1 July 2025, highlighting that it raised more questions than it answered. Meta did not address our response.
We have sought comment from Meta on this present post. As of publication, no response has been received.
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