What verification means here
A record enters this register only when someone has opened the cited document, read the passage the record rests on, and written down the date. That is a narrow claim and it is worth being precise about what it excludes. It does not mean the source is correct. It does not mean the source is current. It does not mean the events described occurred as described — for two of the five records, the source is a party asserting its own case, and reading it carefully cannot make it more than that.
What the check does establish is that the record is not a summary of a summary. Every quotation, date, count and procedural step on the register page was taken from the document itself on , not from a secondary account of it.
The four source classes
The register sorts its material into four classes, and the class determines what a record is permitted to assert.
Oversight Board decision
Weight. Adjudicated, binding on Meta as to the individual piece of content, and published with reasoning.
Carries. What happened in that one case, what rule the Board found applicable, and what the Board asked Meta to change.
Cannot carry. Prevalence. A decision is selected precisely because it is contested; the sample is not representative of anything, by construction.
Platform statement
Weight. The platform describing its own intentions in its own words.
Carries. What the company has publicly committed to doing, which is a fact about the company that can be quoted back to it.
Cannot carry. Any evidence about application. A published policy is the ceiling of what enforcement is supposed to be, never a measurement of what it was.
Coalition allegation
Weight. Advocacy. Signed, attributable, and asserting facts that no one outside the signatories has tested.
Carries. That named organisations, on the record, say a thing is happening to them, and what remedies they are asking for.
Cannot carry. The truth of the underlying incidents, their number, their cause, or any intent behind them.
Unverified citation
Weight. None. Retained as a visible failure rather than deleted.
Carries. That this register once rested a claim on a source it can no longer produce.
Cannot carry. Anything at all about the world.
Why the register holds counter-evidence
One of the two adjudicated decisions here cuts against the suppression thesis: a commercial post promoting ketamine treatment stayed up through three removals and restorations, was defended by Meta, and was ordered removed only after the Board intervened. It is in the register on purpose. An evidence base assembled to support a conclusion is a brief, not a register, and the way to tell them apart is to look for the record that hurts.
The honest reading of the two decisions together is not that Meta suppresses this subject or that it does not. It is that enforcement in this category was found inconsistent in both directions, and that in the second case the Board identified a mechanical cause for it: reviewers working at scale cannot see the paid-partnership label and have no way to route content to the team that enforces the policy attached to it.
The one failed citation
One record cites a congressional press release that returned HTTP 404 when checked, with no Wayback Machine snapshot available. The claim it once supported has been withdrawn and the row kept, marked, and stripped of evidentiary weight. Deleting it would have concealed two things worth knowing: that the register once rested a claim on a source it cannot produce, and that the failure was found. A register that quietly drops its broken citations gives a reader no way to judge how often that happens.
Source register
Every cited source, with the retrieval result recorded on 29 August 2026.
Ayahuasca post removal overturned — case 2021-013-IG-UA
Ketamine paid-partnership post ordered removed — case 2023-010-IG-MR
Reported congressional letter on illicit-drug advertising — source not verifiable
Not retrievable. Cited URL walberg.house.gov/media/press-releases/walberg-castor-lead-bipartisan-letter-meta-over-illicit-drug-advertisements returned HTTP 404 and has no Wayback Machine snapshot.
Meta announced reach and monetisation penalties for spam tactics
https://about.fb.com/news/2025/04/cracking-down-spammy-content-facebook/
Coalition open letter alleging disproportionate moderation of drug-policy content
Internal assessment
The assessment control on each card — Unreviewed, Priority follow-up, Context only — is optional browser-local triage. It is stored under the key platform-evidence-lab-v1 in your own browser, is never transmitted, and is not a verified fact, a legal conclusion, or a finding about intent. The JSON export writes it alongside the record so an internal note travels with the evidence it annotates and the two stay distinguishable.
Review cadence
Links and claims were checked on . The next review is due . Both dates are recorded values, not generated from the clock; they change only when the work is done again.