Meta's recent right-wing tilt has led to many people declaring that they are ditching the company's apps. But according to a new report, companies led by Mark Zuckerberg are still doing well, according to data from Apptopia and other analytics firms Business Insider. report Engagement with Meta's main app is “now similar to what it was before the company announced it was replacing third-party fact-checkers with community notes.” and roll back DEI initiatives.”
Meta has more than 3 billion daily active users worldwide on platforms including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. It's hard to escape network effects. If all your friends and family use WhatsApp, it's not easy to ditch the app. And for Meta business, there is The most effective ad targeting tool In the world, perhaps the only competitor to Google, X, formerly known as Twitter, saw its advertising spending drop significantly after content restrictions were lifted. This is partly because the user base is small and it was never a good place to advertise in the first place. Therefore, it is easy for businesses to shift spending elsewhere.
In addition, the US population It's still not one-sixth of Meta's overall user base, as Facebook remains popular outside the United States. Despite its “dead” feel, political maneuvering in the United States may not be relevant to people in other parts of the world, even though advertisers generally spend more to reach users in America than they do in other parts of the world. another But its large global user base certainly helps with its protection.
And Meta appears to be seeing increased spending on in-app purchases after the policy change:
“After looking at download and revenue data for Meta's social apps, I was unable to detect any significant or unusual declines,” Randy Nelson, head of insights at App Figures, told BI. reality In some cases there has been an increase,” he said.
A comparison of App Figures over the 13 days before and after Meta's announcement to end fact-checking shows that US in-app purchases On Meta's platform, this increased to $1.9 million for Facebook and $3 million for Instagram, which were increases of 5% and 3%, respectively.
It helps that TikTok's fate in the US remains in limbo:
Apptopia data found that the number of daily active users of Facebook dropped about 2% year-on-year during most of January. It began showing year-over-year growth on January 18 as speculation intensified ahead of the Supreme Court decision on TikTok.
Instagram saw an even stronger recovery, with DAU increasing on January 18th and continuing to grow above last year's numbers on January 19th and 20th.
Since President Trump won re-election in November, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone full-court press to slam the administration after an acrimonious relationship during his first term. Republicans attacked Meta for allegedly censoring conservative voices. Even though conservative content has long dominated Facebook, Zuckerberg is the consummate businessman and doesn't want to waste four years pushing back. So he, along with other tech executives, did. everything they can To show loyalty to the White House He is already notoriously averse to being in the fact-checking and content-moderating business, having brought in a pseudo-independent “oversight council” several years ago to take on some of the responsibility. Trump's presidency has given him comfort.
It's important to remember that Meta does not completely eliminate content moderation. Still delete content related to bullying. harassment and other behaviors that violates policy and fact checking No matter what you think It appears to be ineffective in influencing users' opinions when they distrust or ignore labels. But it seems that some Meta apps have become even more of a cesspool than they already are. Because fact-checking will be replaced by crowd-sourced records (which may reproduce slowly) and users are allowed to write things they couldn't do in the past, such as homosexuality being a mental illness. And all undocumented immigrants are criminals.
It's probably too early to tell whether users will leave Meta apps in large numbers. But don't believe it yet.