Meta has been paid $3.2 million to promote Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson has careened towards the fringe since being forced out of Fox News two years ago, using his newfound independence and an eponymous platform to promote the idea that "chemtrails" are real — that the clouds produced by high-altitude aircraft are "far worse than anything you imagined" — and to host historical revisionists who argue the United States might have picked the wrong side in World War II.

It may come as no surprise that a right-wing influencer is producing the sort of conspiratorial content that thrives in today's online information environment. But Carlson is going viral not just with the help of Elon Musk's X, but with an assist from a tech giant that he once accused of silencing his voice.

In a little over two years, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has received an estimated $3.2 million ($3,272,065) to promote Carlson and the work of his media company, Last Country, Inc., according to publicly available ad data. And that work has often been deeply conspiratorial: An analysis of the data reveals that, as of Nov. 18, 2025, Meta had accepted at least $694,400 — and as much as $844,156 — to promote Carlson's recent web series, "The 9/11 Files," which suggests that at least one hijacked plane may not have actually crashed on Sept. 11, 2001, and asserts, as fact, that the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 was a "controlled demolition."

The financial relationship between Carlson and Meta has blossomed even as others on the right have sought to distance themselves from the former prime-time anchor.

In October, Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes, an avowed white nationalist and antisemite who has defended segregation and praised Adolf Hitler. Fuentes used the platform to argue that "organized Jewry" is an obstacle to national unity, describing Jews as "a stateless people" who are "unassimilable." The conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, in response, described Carlson as "the most virulent superspreader of vile ideas in America."

Carlson does not appear to have advertised his Fuentes interview on Facebook. Instead, his media company has focused on promoting his 9/11 series, ads for which have now garnered at least 12 million impressions on the social network. Two of the most common ads feature photos of Carlson and former President George W. Bush, superimposed over the Twin Towers and under the heading "False Flag," a term for an attack that's intended to frame someone else as the perpetrator.

"Cut straight through the establishment's narrative with firsthand accounts and primary sources and uncover what really happened on September 11, 2001," reads the text on one sponsored message. "Firsthand accounts and declassified documents prove that intelligence agencies had the information necessary to stop the attacks on September 11, 2001," states the other.

A third ad, now inactive, declared that the "official story of what happened on 9/11 is a complete lie."

Carlson's five-part series on the 2001 terror attacks rehashes a litany of claims associated with the so-called "9/11 Truth" movement. It begins, however, with what is essentially a restatement of the official story: that U.S. intelligence agencies had connections with 9/11 hijackers, knew they were in the United States and did not communicate the threat they posed to U.S. law enforcement. This is, indeed, a key part of the 9/11 Commission Report, which faulted the CIA and FBI for not sharing intelligence with each other that, if acted upon, might have prevented the attacks.

Carlson revisits these failings and stops short of claiming they were intentional. But that is not where the series ends.

In a later installment, Carlson openly cites 9/11 conspiracy theorists, with episode four of the series focusing on the destruction of 7 World Trade Center, or WTC-7. That building, adjacent to the Twin Towers, collapsed in the hours after the attacks, which Carlson says was "odd" and — despite showing a montage of television news footage — "almost entirely ignored."

After listing various government agencies that had offices in the building, Carlson cites the group "Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth." That group published a report that claims to debunk the conclusion of experts associated with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who found the building was brought down due to a combination of structural damage, caused by debris from the initial attacks, and the intense fires that ensued.

That official assessment is not plausible, Carlson tells his viewers.

"Why then did Building 7 collapse after just seven hours of burning, in a way that no steel-frame building anywhere in the world has ever collapsed?" Carlson asks. "With the support of a group called Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth... Professor [Leroy] Hulsey found that office fires of the kind in Building 7 on 9/11 could not have produced sufficient thermal expansion to cause the crucial girder to fail. It's impossible, he found."

Carlson concludes: "There's only one thing that could have triggered the collapse that we saw on television, and that is a controlled demolition." (On its website, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth claims that all three World Trade Center buildings "were destroyed by controlled demolition using nano-thermite and possibly other explosive and incendiary materials.")

Later in the fourth episode, Carlson also suggests that there was something unusual about the destruction of Flight 93, the plane that crashed in southwestern Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, and killed 44 people on board, including four hijackers.

"Why wasn't there substantial wreckage of Flight 93 at its supposed crash site in Shanksville, Pennsylvania? We were told the crash of that aircraft was so powerful that it vaporized the aircraft's hull. And yet the hijackers' passports were found intact at the site. How does that work?" Carlson asks.

Meta did not respond to requests for comment.

Carlson's media company appears to have begun paid promotions on Meta platforms in February 26, 2024, starting with two ads: one featuring Carlson criticizing former President Barack Obama for "stoking race hatred," and another promoting an interview with anti-vaccine campaigner Steve Kirsch ("How many people died from the COVID shot?" reads the description on Carlson's site).

Meta has long been criticized for allowing misinformation and hate speech to proliferate on its platforms. In May 2021, responding to such concerns, the company announced it was adopting measures to help ensure bad actors were not being rewarded by its algorithms.

"Whether it's false or misleading content about COVID-19 and vaccines, climate change, elections or other topics, we're making sure fewer people see misinformation on our apps," the company said at the time.

But following President Donald Trump's election victory in 2024, Meta reversed course, ending its partnership with third-party fact checkers and lifting several previous restrictions on misinformation.

In an explainer on its website, Meta states that while it still prohibits "graphic violence or hateful conduct," misinformation is "different from other types of speech" and "there is no way to articulate a comprehensive list of what is prohibited."

"The world is changing constantly, and what is true one minute may not be true the next minute," the company says.

In announcing the shift, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a January 2025 video, said he had decided to lift previous content restrictions because they had "increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far."

It's not clear what impact that decision has had on how Meta treats conspiracy theories. In the past, though, it had removed ads promoting conspiratorial claims about terror attacks.

In 2019, for example, the group "Crowdsource The Truth" bought an ad to promote an interview with Richard Gage, described therein as "the founder of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth." According to Meta, "This content was removed because it didn't follow our Advertising Standards."

In 2020, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth itself purchased a Facebook ad to promote its claims about the "controlled demolition" of WTC-7. "We are proud to announce the release of the final report of the four-year computer modeling study of World Trade Center Building 7," the ad stated, linking to the same report that Carlson cites in his 9/11 series.

The ad was quickly removed for running "without a required disclaimer" detailing who paid for it, according to Meta's Ad Library.

The ads promoting Carlson's 9/11 series are clearly labeled as paid for by Last Country, Inc., which the former Fox News personality founded in 2023 with Neil Patel. He and Patel — a former policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney — earlier cofounded The Daily Caller, a conservative news site, which Carlson has since left.

Last Country, Inc., which operates the "Tucker Carlson Network" streaming platform and manages Tucker Carlson's Facebook presence, did not respond to requests for comment.

The company's ability to purchase millions of dollars' worth of ads stems, in part, from the financial support it has received from another conservative company with ties to the Trump family.

In October 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that Last Country, Inc., had secured $15 million in investment from 1789 Capital, a self-styled anti-"woke" venture capital firm that counts Donald Trump Jr. as a partner.

Earlier this year, Omeed Malik, the founder of 1789 Capital, specifically lauded Meta for responding to the 2024 election by lifting restrictions on misinformation that he argued had resulted in the censorship of conservatives. Appearing on CNBC in January 2025, Malik said he was "very happy that even big companies are starting to realize the error of their ways," arguing that executives like Zuckerberg can see "where the leaves are blowing" and where money is now to be made.

"It turns out that free speech is good business," Malik commented.

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