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Meta’s recent right-wing tilt has prompted many people to declare they are ditching the company’s apps, but according to a new report, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company is still doing just fine. Citing data from Apptopia and other analytics firms, Business Insider reports that commitment to Meta’s core programs is “similar now to what it was before the company announced it would replace third-party reviewers with community notes and cancel its DEI initiatives.”
Meta has more than 3 billion daily active users worldwide across its platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. It’s hard to break free from network effects—if all your friends and family use WhatsApp, it’s not that simple to quit the app. And for businesses, Meta has the most effective advertising targeting device in the world, perhaps only rivaling Google. X, formerly Twitter, saw a big drop in ad spending after it lifted content restrictions, in part because its user base was small and it was never a great place to advertise in the first place, so it was easy for businesses to shift spending elsewhere. .
Furthermore, the US population is not even a sixth of Meta’s overall user base—Facebook remains quite popular outside the US, despite a feeling here that it is “dead”. Its political maneuvers in the United States may not be relevant to people in other parts of the world. Although advertisers typically spend more money to reach users in America than anywhere else, the massive global user base certainly helps set it apart.
And it appears that Meta has seen an increase in spending on in-app purchases following the policy changes:
“After looking at the download and revenue data for Meta’s social apps, I couldn’t detect any large or extraordinary decline,” Randy Nelson, the head of insights at App Figures, told BI. “In fact, in some cases there have been increases,” he said.
App Figures’ comparison of the 13 days before and after Meta’s announcement to end fact-checking shows that US in-app purchases on Meta’s platforms grew to $1.9 million for Facebook and $3 million for Instagram, representing increases of 5% and 3%, respectively. .
It helps that TikTok’s fate in the US remains in limbo:
Apptopia data found that Facebook’s daily active users, which had been down about 2% year over year for most of January, began showing year-over-year growth on Jan. 18 as speculation intensified ahead of a Supreme Court ruling on TikTok .
Instagram saw an even stronger rebound, with DAUs increasing on January 18th and continuing to grow over the previous year’s numbers on both January 19th and 20th.
Since President Trump won re-election in November, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been in full court press for winning over the administration after a rocky relationship during his first term. Republicans have attacked Meta for allegedly censoring conservative voices, even though conservative-leaning content has long dominated Facebook. But Zuckerberg is a consummate businessman and doesn’t want to spend four years getting revenge, so he, along with other tech executives, did. everything they can show loyalty to the White House. He notoriously didn’t like being in the business of fact-checking and moderating content anyway, implementing a pseudo-independent “Council of Control” years ago to take over some of the responsibility. Trump’s presidency gives him an easy way out.
It’s important to remember that Meta doesn’t do away with content moderation entirely. It will still remove content for bullying, harassment and other behavior that violates its policies. And fact-checking, whatever you think of it, seems to be ineffective in swaying users’ opinions because they distrusted or simply ignored the labels. But it looks like certain Meta apps will become more hollow than they already are, as fact-checking is replaced by crowd-sourced notes (which can be slow to spread) and users are allowed to write things they couldn’t in the past, like that homosexuality is a mental illness and all undocumented immigrants are criminals.
It may be too early to tell whether or not users will abandon Meta apps in droves, but be skeptical.
