Mark Zuckerberg

The playbook

He is the first subject where all four kinds of document apply to one person. Form 4s cover the stock, the quarterly filings cover the business, Meta is in court more or less permanently, and it is one of the largest lobbying spenders in the country. That means a statement of his can be checked against four separate records rather than one, which is a wider net than we have had on anybody.

The court seam is the strongest and the one to work first, because both halves end up being his own words. What a company says about its product in public and what its lawyers argue about that same product in a filing are written for different audiences and rarely match in tone. Where they diverge on substance, that is a receipt, and it needs no inference at all: you quote the statement and you quote the filing.

The rule that governs all of it here is the allegation rule. A complaint against Meta is somebody's claim and we report it as one. Meta's own answer, motion or sworn testimony is Meta's stated position and can be quoted like any other statement. Keep those two apart in every sentence.

Receipt history

1. 13 In 2024 he offered teen time limits as something parents could switch on. In 2026 Meta signed a court order switching them on by default. Jan 31, 2024 routine

What we're watching

• Ongoing Public statements about a product, checked against what Meta's own filings in litigation say about the same product. Their answer is quotable; the other side's complaint is an allegation.
• Ongoing Lobbying is search-only until the disclosure API is set up, so anything found there is unverified secondary and must be labelled as such.
• Ongoing Form 4 sales through the family trust, read with the selling plan adoption dates in the footnotes.