In the first quarter of 2024, Meta made $36.45 billion dollars - $12.37 billion dollars of which was pure profit. Though the company no longer reports daily active users, it now uses another metric: “family daily active people.” This number refers to “registered and logged-in users of one or more of Facebook’s Family products who visited at least one of these products on a particular day.”
This quiet, seemingly innocent change to how Meta reports growth is significant insofar as it will no longer have to report its Daily Active or Monthly active users, meaning that the only source of truth in Meta’s growth story is a vague growth metric that could be manipulated to mean just about anything. Three billion “daily active people” across Meta’s “family” combines WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger (which I’m confident it counts separately), Oculus, and Threads.
Yeah, my point is that there are fewer and fewer markets that let the profit off of people this way. Either they die or they find an ethical way to make money, that doesn’t violate peoples data rights.
That’s undeniably a good thing, but I’m still cynical that capital will ever find a truly “ethical” niche to exploit.
Of course that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to legally constrain it as much as possible, as I’ve just learned has been done in the EU, thank you!