Meta Platforms - statistics & facts
The rise and rise of Facebook led to the creation of one of the most influential companies in the world: Meta Platforms
Inc. In the ever-evolving landscape of social media, Meta shapes the way billions of people connect and interact online.
From humble beginnings to audiences of billions, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta remains king of the social media jungle.
Clear market dominance
Meta Platforms owns social media giants Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, among others, all of which
are household names that continue to see user growth. As of the fourth quarter of 2024, the company reported a
staggering 3.35 billion daily active users across its core products. This huge user base translates into significant profit,
with Meta's average revenue per user reaching 49.63 U.S. dollars in 2024, up from 44.60 U.S. dollars in the previous
year.
Facebook is by far the most popular social network in the world, with just over three billion users, followed by YouTube,
Instagram, WhatsApp, and TikTok, respectively. Meta’s Threads, which was released in July 2023, broke records by
generating 150 million mobile app downloads in just six days. For context, mobile gaming apps Pokémon GO and Call of
Duty: Mobile required 33 and 106 days to reach this number of downloads.
Let the money talk
In 2024, the Meta’s annual revenue reached 164.5 billion U.S. dollars, a significant increase from 134.9 billion U.S.
dollars in 2023. Around 98.6 percent of Meta’s revenue is generated by its Family of Apps, with the remaining 1.5
percent being generated by Reality Labs. Moreover, most of Meta’s revenue is produced through advertising, with over
160 billion U.S. dollars being generated via ads in 2024. The company incurred advertising expenses of over 2.06 U.S.
dollars in its latest financial year.
As of October 2024, Meta Platforms’ market value stood at 1.4 trillion U.S. dollars, ranking in third place after Alphabet
and Amazon.
Meta’s lead role in social media marketing
Social media platforms continue to play a crucial role in brand promotion and customer engagement. A 2024 survey
revealed that Facebook was the most important social media platform for marketers worldwide, with 44 percent of
respondents highlighting its significance. Additionally, for business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers, Facebook was the
most widely used platform, with 91 percent reporting its use for marketing purposes. Meta’s networks fall short when it
comes to business-to-business (B2B) marketers, who favor LinkedIn.
It's not all plain sailing
Meta’s success has not been without problems. The company has struggled to comply with online privacy regulations,
which have often resulted in large fines. Among the most recent was the 91 million euro fine issued in 2024 by the Irish
Data Protection Commission (DPC). The fine was placed after the Irish data privacy watchdog found out that user
passwords were stored in 'plaintext' on Meta's internal systems rather than with cryptographic protection or encryption.
Between 2022 and 2024, the company faced numerous penalties from the DPC and the EU. Additionally, Meta’s
networks are no stranger to problematic content, with millions of different types of harmful material being
removed every quarter.
Regardless of the issues that people may face on Meta’s well-known social media platforms, users continue to utilize
these networks. After 21 years in the making, Mark Zuckerberg’s company is still ahead of the competition.
Source: Statista. Published by Daniel Slotta, Dec 17, 2025
Meta reports mixed financial results amid spree of AI
hiring and spending
Tech company brings in record quarterly revenue but major tax bill dampens earnings per share
The Guardian, Johana Bhuiyan, Wed 29 Oct 2025 17.57 EDT
Meta reported mixed financial results for the third quarter of 2025. The company brought in record quarterly
revenue but reported a major tax bill that dampened earnings per share, the company announced on
Wednesday. The financial results come as Meta ends a multibillion-dollar hiring spree focused on artificial
intelligence talent.
The tech giant earned $51.24bn in quarterly revenue, beating Wall Street expectations and the company’s own
projections for third-quarter sales. However, it reported earnings per share (EPS) of $1.05, far below Wall
Street expectations of $6.70 in EPS. The major drop was due to a one-time non-cash income tax charge of
$15.93bn. The EPS would have been $7.25 without this one-time charge, the company said.
The report, and the scheduled investor call, gives investors another opportunity to find out whether the
company’s lavish spending on AI infrastructure is justified. The company projected full-year total expenses
would be between $116m and $118bn, upping the lower end of the range from $114bn. The company also
expects 2025 capital expenditures to be between $70bn and $72bn, up from a previously projected range of
$66bn and $72bn. Meta said its fourth-quarter revenue would likely fall somewhere between $56bn and
$59bn.
“We had a strong quarter for our business and our community,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and
CEO. “Meta Superintelligence Labs is off to a great start and we continue to lead the industry in AI glasses. If
we deliver even a fraction of the opportunity ahead, then the next few years will be the most exciting period in
our history.”
Jesse Cohen, senior analyst at Investing.com, said the latest report reveals “the growing tension between the
company’s massive AI infrastructure investments and investor expectations for near-term returns”.
Spending is not expected to slow down any time soon, however. On the earnings call, Susan Li, the company’s
chief financial officer, said Meta will need to “invest aggressively” in 2026 to meet the company’s
computational needs. Earlier this month, the company announced a new joint venture with Blue Owl Capital
that would help the firms build and finance the new $27bn Hyperion data center campus in Louisiana, the
biggest Meta is involved in developing.
“We also anticipate total expenses will grow at a significantly faster percentage rate in 2026 than 2025, with
growth driven primarily by infrastructure costs, including incremental cloud expenses and depreciation,” Li
said. “Employee compensation costs will be the second largest contributor to growth, as we recognize a full year
of compensation for employees hired throughout 2025, particularly AI talent, and add technical talent in
priority areas.”
When asked about how the company is balancing releasing products that will show near-term returns on
investment with these larger research-focused projects, Zuckerberg said that Meta AI is a “massive latent
opportunity” and pointed to the company’s ability to bring its new products to billions of users.
“The research is going to enable technological capabilities to exist and then those capabilities can get built into
all kinds of different products,” Zuckerberg said.
It’s the first financial update since Meta said it planned to lay off 600 staffers from its AI unit – the same unit
the company went on a spending and hiring spree to restructure and fill with the top AI talent from other
companies. The company said the layoffs were an effort to reduce the bloat within the company’s “superintelligence” unit and brought the number of employees there down to just under 3,000.
Zuckerberg said the investment into Meta’s Superintelligence Labs helped the company build what he
described as “the highest talent density lab in the industry at this point”.
The company’s stock has been on a steady rise over the past six months. Its previous two earnings reports have
beaten Wall Street expectations. The wider US stock market likewise reached record highs the week.
Meta also launched its new Ray-Ban Display glasses last month, which feature a screen embedded in the lenses,
and analysts were eager to hear sales figures. But the unit responsible for these glasses as well as Meta’s virtual
reality headsets posted a massive $4.4bn loss. Zuckerberg said the company’s collaborations with Ray-Ban and
Oakleys on these AI glasses were going well and that these investments will likely be very profitable. Meta’s
original camera glasses, simply dubbed Meta Ray-Bans, proved to be a popular gadget. Both types of glasses
have already prompted privacy concerns. While Meta has designed the glasses not to work if a light that
notifies people that the glasses are recording is covered, a $60 modification can disable the light, 404 Media
reported.
“I suspect these glasses, in particular, will predominantly appeal to early ‘tech-curious’ adopters, and that
scheduled demos will far outpace sales,” said Mike Proulx, Forrester VP research director.
On the advertising side, Meta lost its accreditation from the Media Rating Council, a non-profit that sets
industry-wide standards for brand safety, after the company decided to pull out of the organization’s annual
audits. The accreditation signals to advertisers that the content on the platform that their ads may appear next
to would not be harmful to their brand. Meta received the accreditation just four months before it was stripped.
Analysts were optimistic that the loss of accreditation would not ultimately hurt Meta’s ability to attract
advertisers.
“While this may raise eyebrows among advertisers, it won’t deter them from investing in Meta due to its sheer
audience reach and brand reliance,” Proulx said. “Brands will overlook potential brand-safety risks as long as
their Meta media investments continue to perform.”
From Llamas to Avocados: Meta’s shifting AI strategy is
causing internal confusion
PUBL I SHED T UE, DEC 9 202 57: 0 0 AM ES T UP D AT E D T UE, DEC 9 202 58: 3 3 PM EST
CNBC Jonathan Vanian
KEY POINTS
•
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Meta is pursuing a new frontier AI model, codenamed Avocado, that could be proprietary instead of
open source, CNBC has learned.
The company is trying to keep pace with artificial intelligence rivals OpenAI and Google after spending
$14.3 billion to bring in the founder of Scale AI and a handful of top researchers and engineers.
•
“In many ways, Meta has been the opposite of Alphabet, where it entered the year as an AI winner and
now faces more questions around investment levels and ROI,” analysts at KeyBanc Capital Markets
wrote in a note to clients late last month.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was so optimistic last year about his company’s Llama family of artificial
intelligence models that he predicted they would become the “most advanced in the industry” and “bring the
benefits of AI to everyone.”
But after including a whole section on Llama in his opening remarks during Meta’s earnings call in January of
this year, he mentioned the brand name only once on the latest call in October. The company’s obsession with
its open-source large language model has given way to a very different approach to AI, one focused around a
multibillion-dollar hiring spree to bring in top industry talent that could help Meta take on the likes
of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.
As 2025 comes to a close, Meta’s strategy remains scattershot, according to insiders and industry experts,
feeding the perception that the company has fallen further behind its top AI rivals, whose models are rapidly
gaining adoption in the consumer and enterprise markets.
Meta is pursuing a new Llama successor and frontier AI model, codenamed Avocado, CNBC has learned.
People with knowledge of the matter said many within the company were expecting the model to be released
before the end of this year. The plan is for that to happen in the first quarter of 2026, a person familiar with the
company’s plans told CNBC. The model is wrestling with various training-related performance testing intended
to ensure the system is well received when it eventually debuts, said the people, who asked not to be named
because they weren’t authorized to speak on the matter.
“Our model training efforts are going according to plan and have had no meaningful timing changes,” a Meta
spokesperson said in a statement.
With its stock underperforming the broader tech sector this year and badly trailing Google parent Alphabet,
Wall Street is looking for a sense of direction and a path to a return on investment after Meta spent $14.3
billion in June to hire Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang and a handful of his top engineers and researchers.
Four months after that announcement, which included Meta purchasing a big stake in Scale, the social media
company raised its 2025 guidance for capital expenditures to between $70 billion and $72 billion from a prior
range of $66 billion to $72 billion.
“In many ways, Meta has been the opposite of Alphabet, where it entered the year as an AI winner and now
faces more questions around investment levels and ROI,” analysts at KeyBanc Capital Markets wrote in a
November note to clients. The firm recommends buying both stocks.
At the heart of Meta’s challenge is the sustained dominance of its core business: digital advertising.
Even with annual sales in excess of $160 billion, Meta’s ad targeting business, driven by massive
improvements in AI and the popularity of Instagram, is growing revenue north of 20% a year. Investors have
lauded the company for using AI to bolster the strength of its cash cow and to make the organization more
efficient and less bloated.
But Zuckerberg has much grander ambitions, and the new guard he’s brought in to push the future vision of
AI has no background in online ads. The 41-year-old founder, with a net worth of more than $230 billion, has
suggested that if Meta doesn’t take big swings, it risks becoming an afterthought in a world that’s poised to be
defined by AI.
Until recently, Meta’s unique position in AI was the open-source nature of its Llama models. Unlike other AI
models, Meta’s technology was made freely available so third-party researchers and others could access the
tools and ultimately improve them.
“Today, several tech companies are developing leading closed models,” Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post in
July 2024. “But open source is quickly closing the gap.”
He’s since started changing his tune. Zuckerberg hinted over the summer that Meta was considering shaking
up its approach to open source after the April release of Llama 4, which failed to captivate developers.
Zuckerberg said in July that, “We’ll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we
choose to open source.”
Avocado, when it’s eventually made available, could be a proprietary model, according to people familiar with
the matter. That means outside developers wouldn’t be able to freely download its so-called weights and
related software components.
Some at Meta were upset that the R1 model released by Chinese AI lab DeepSeek earlier this year
incorporated pieces of Llama’s architecture, the people said, further underscoring the risks of open source and
hammering home the idea that the company should overhaul its strategy.
The company’s high-priced AI hires and leaders of the recently launched Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL,
have also questioned the open-source AI strategy and favored creating a more powerful proprietary AI model,
CNBC reported in July. A Meta spokesperson said at the time that the company’s “position on open source AI
is unchanged.”
The Llama 4 flub was a significant catalyst in Zuckerberg’s pivot, the people said, and also led to a major
internal shake-up. Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer and a 20-year company veteran who was hired as its
13th software engineer, no longer oversees the AI division, formally known as the GenAI unit, after the botched
release, the people said.
Zuckerberg went on a spending spree to retool Meta’s AI leadership.
He landed on Wang, then Scale AI’s 28-year-old CEO, who was named Meta’s new chief AI officer and, in
August, became the head of an elite unit called TBD Lab. Avocado is being developed inside TBD, people
familiar with the matter said.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in June that Meta was trying to lure talent from his company with gigantic pay
packages, including sky-high $100 million signing bonuses, which Meta said at the time was
a misrepresentation.
Along with Wang came other tech bigwigs, including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who heads the product
and applied research arm of MSL, and Shengjia Zhao, who was a ChatGPT co-creator. They’ve brought with
them modern methods that have become the standard for frontier AI development in Silicon Valley, and have
upended the traditional software development process inside Meta, the people said.
Meta’s AI culture shift
Wang is now under pressure to deliver a top-tier AI model that helps the company regain momentum against
rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, the people said.
That pressure has only increased as competitors stepped up their game. Google’s Gemini 3, unveiled last
month, has drawn solid reviews from users and analysts. OpenAI recently announced new updates to its GPT5 AI model, while Anthropic debuted its Claude Opus 4.5 model in November shortly after releasing two
other major models.
Analysts previously told CNBC that there’s no clear leading AI model, because some perform better on certain
tasks like conversations or coding. But the one constant is that all of the major model creators have to spend a
lot of money on AI to maintain any competitive edge, they said.
A hefty dose of that spending lines the pockets of Nvidia, the leading developer of AI graphics processing
units. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang laid out the state of play during his company’s earnings call in November,
after the chipmaker reported 62% year-over-year revenue growth. He highlighted a number of model
developers as big customers, including Elon Musk’s xAI.
“We run OpenAI. We run Anthropic. We run xAI because of our deep partnership with Elon and xAI,” Huang
said. “We run Gemini. We run Thinking Machines. Let’s see, what else do we run? We run them all.”
At no point did Huang reference Llama, although elsewhere on the call he said Meta’s Gem, “a foundation
model for ad recommendations trained on large-scale GPU clusters,” drove an improvement in ad conversions
at Meta in the second quarter.
Wang isn’t the only Meta exec feeling the heat.
Friedman has also been tasked with producing a breakout AI product, the people said. He was responsible for
Meta’s September launch of Vibes, a feed of AI-generated short videos, which is widely viewed as inferior to
OpenAI’s Sora 2, they said. Former employees and creators told CNBC that the product was rushed to market
and lacked key features, like the ability to generate realistic lip-synched audio.
Although Vibes has attracted more interest to the company’s stand-alone Meta AI app, it trails the Sora app as
measured by downloads, according to data provided to CNBC by Appfigures.
Pressure is being felt across Meta’s AI organizations, where 70-hour workweeks have become the norm, the
people said, while teams have also been hit with layoffs and restructurings throughout the year.
In October, Meta cut 600 jobs in MSL to reduce layers and operate more quickly. Those layoffs impacted
employees in areas like the Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit, or FAIR, and played a key role in
chief AI scientist Yann LeCun’s decision to leave the company to launch a startup, according to people with
knowledge of the matter.
LeCun declined to comment.
Zuckerberg’s high-stakes decision to turn to outsiders like Wang and Friedman to lead the company’s AI efforts
represented a major change for a company that’s historically promoted long-tenured workers to top posts, the
people said.
In Wang and Friedman, Zuckerberg has handed the controls to experts in infrastructure and related systems,
rather than consumer apps. The new leaders also brought a different management style and one that’s
unfamiliar inside Meta.
In particular, insiders told CNBC that Wang and Friedman are more cloistered in their communications, a
contrast to a historically open approach of sharing work and chatting on the company’s Workplace internal
social network
Members of Wang’s TBD Lab, who work near Zuckerberg’s office, don’t use Workplace, people familiar said,
adding that they’re not even on the network and that the group operates like a separate startup.
However, Zuckerberg isn’t giving the new AI leadership team complete autonomy. Aparna Ramani,
engineering vice president, who has been with Meta for nearly a decade, has been put in charge of overseeing
the distribution of computing resources for MSL, the people said.
And in October, Vishal Shah was moved from leading the company’s metaverse initiatives within Reality Labs,
where he’d been for four years, to a new role as vice president of AI Products, working with Friedman. Shah is
considered a loyal lieutenant who has helped act as a bridge between the company’s traditional social apps
like Instagram and newer projects like Reality Labs, the people said.
Meta confirmed last week that it plans to cut resources for its virtual reality and related metaverse initiatives,
shifting its attention to its popular AI-infused glasses developed with EssilorLuxottica.
‘Demo, don’t memo’
One of the biggest points of tension between the old and the new is in the realm of software development,
people familiar with the matter said.
In creating products, Meta has traditionally sought input from numerous groups responsible for areas like frontend user interface, design, algorithmic feeds and privacy, the people said. The multistep process was intended
to ensure some level of uniformity among the company’s apps that attract billions of users each day.
But the many internal tools built over the years to help coders create software and features weren’t developed
to accommodate foundation models. Meta’s new AI leaders, notably Friedman, view them as bottlenecks
slowing down what should be a rapid-fire development process, the people said.
Friedman has called for MSL to use newer tools that have been calibrated to incorporate multiple AI models
and various kinds of coding automation software often called AI agents, the people said.
“They have this mantra now saying ‘Demo, don’t memo,’” Lovable CEO Anton Osika said in October at the
Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, about Meta’s new development process.
Osika said Meta employees have been using Lovable’s tools to more quickly build internal apps, specifically
referencing the company’s finance teams, which have turned to Lovable to create software for tracking head
count and planning.
While Meta continues retooling its app development methods and pushes toward releasing Avocado, the
company has been experimenting with other AI models on its products. Vibes, for instance, relied on AI models
from Black Forest Labs and Midjourney, a startup that counts Friedman as an advisor.
Meta is also altering its approach to infrastructure, and is increasingly turning to third-party cloud computing
services like CoreWeave and Oracle for developing and testing AI features as it builds out its own massive
data centers, the people said.
The social media giant announced in October that it signed a joint venture agreement with Blue Owl Capital as
part of a $27 billion deal to help fund and develop the gargantuan Hyperion data center in Richland Parish,
Louisiana. The company said at the time that the partnership provides the “the speed and flexibility” Meta
needs to build the data center and support its “long-term AI ambitions.”
Despite the company’s challenges in 2025, Zuckerberg’s message to employees and investors is that he’s
more committed than ever to winning. At the top of the company’s earnings call in October, Zuckerberg said
MSL is “off to a strong start.”
“I think that we’ve already built the lab with the highest talent density in the industry,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re
heads down developing our next generation of models and products and I’m looking forward to sharing more
on that front over the coming months.”
Why Meta could struggle to defend itself against 41 states (and D.C.)
suing over Facebook, Instagram’s alleged harm to kids
Northeastern Global News, by Cody Mello-Klein January 5, 2026
In what could be a landmark moment in the world of tech, attorneys general in 41 states and
Washington, D.C., are suing Meta for knowingly endangering children and getting them addicted to
Facebook and Instagram, despite statements to the contrary.
Colorado and California are leading the charge with a joint lawsuit that includes 33 other states. They
allege that Meta “harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately
ensnare youth and teens,” according to the lawsuit. The District of Columbia and eight other states have
filed separate lawsuits against the company.
The lawsuits from dozens of attorneys general claiming that Meta violated consumer protections laws
evoke the kind of landmark legal actions taken against Big Tobacco and Big Pharma, says Hilary
Robinson, associate professor of law and sociology at Northeastern University. If successful, these cases
could be transformative for how tech companies are held accountable for consumer protection.
“It seems to me that the time is right for harnessing state power,” Robinson says. “This is just another
attempt to figure out how to use it in an effective way that doesn’t destroy the benefits for people who
use these things but reins in these really negative externalities that have had really serious
consequences for individual families.”
It’s a big “if,” but Robinson says the attorneys general are “likely to succeed if they’re able to find in
discovery the kinds of things that in the opioid lawsuit they were able to find, like clear knowledge of
harm.”
Meta has already provided a lot of that evidence itself in some ways, Robinson says.
In 2021, a massive internal leak led to an investigative series from the Wall Street Journal, called “The
Facebook Files.” Documents obtained by the Journal laid out how Facebook was both aware of the
negative impact its platform could have on people, including teenage girls, and actively looking at ways
of attracting young people.
Then, there is an infamous 2014 study published by Facebook in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences. The study, conducted on 700,000 users without their permission, showed
evidence of mass-scale “emotional contagion” through the platform. Emotional contagion is the
spontaneous spread of emotions between people.
This is just another attempt to figure out how to use it in an effective way that doesn’t
destroy the benefits for people who use these things.
“Meta is going to have a hard time defending against this one because they published that study,”
Robinson says. “It’s clear that they looked at their user population as a group whose behavior they are
interested in and they can influence.”
The negative effect social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have on children and
adolescents has been extensively documented, including by Rachel Rodgers, an associate professor of
applied psychology at Northeastern. Rodgers’ research focuses on how Instagram can create body
image concerns and risks for disordered eating in teens.
“This [occurs] through different mechanisms, one of which is the fact that there are a lot of pictures on
these platforms that present unrealistic images of people,” Rodgers says. “This leads to appearance
comparisons and the idea that this is achievable, that this is possible and this is the way you should look.”
Pursuing a consumer protection case is a novel, and potentially impactful, legal approach in the tech
world, where companies often argue they are information service companies, not consumer product
providers. “There are all sorts of ways that we regulate what products are in circulation in the market
economy and what can go into them,” Robinson says, so if this approach is successful, it could set a
precedent for further regulation in the tech sector.
But even if the cases are successful, the traditional strategies for how to hold a company like Meta
accountable, like financial penalties, “might not go quite far enough,” Robinson says.
“The expectation is if you really harm the bottom line or the profit of a business, then you change their
practices going forward,” Robinson says. “That said, a lot of these businesses are beyond the scope of
the regular economy at this point.”
“I’m much more in favor of thinking about how law and technology are both engineering sciences, and
how the law can intervene in the design of these kinds of technologies,” she adds.
Robinson points to laws adopted in Utah that limit how children can use social media. The law focuses
on specific features of social media, specifically push notifications, that can keep young people hooked.
“That law requires that the default be put to no notifications, so when you download the app, the
notifications are off and that if they’re turned on, they have to be held until later,” Robinson says. “That’s
a forward facing intervention into how the app itself operates.”
His Job Was to Make Instagram Safe for Teens. His 14-YearOld Showed Him What the App Was Really Like.
When a Meta security expert told Mark Zuckerberg that Instagram’s approach to
protecting teens wasn’t working, the CEO didn’t reply. Now the former insider is
set to tell Congress about the predatory behavior.
The Wall Street Journal Nov. 2, 2023 9:00 pm ET
By Jeff Horwitz
In the fall of 2021 a consultant named Arturo Bejar sent Meta Platforms
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg an unusual note.
“I wanted to bring to your attention what l believe is a critical gap in how we
as a company approach harm, and how the people we serve experience it,”
he began. Though Meta regularly issued public reports suggesting that it was
largely on top of safety issues on its platforms, he wrote, the company was
deluding itself.
The experience of young users on Meta’s Instagram—where Bejar had spent
the previous two years working as a consultant—was especially acute. In a subsequent email to Instagram
head Adam Mosseri, one statistic stood out: One in eight users under the age of 16 said they had experienced
unwanted sexual advances on the platform over the previous seven days.
For Bejar, that finding was hardly a surprise. His daughter and her friends had been receiving unsolicited penis
pictures and other forms of harassment on the platform since the age of 14, he wrote, and Meta’s systems generally
ignored their reports—or responded by saying that the harassment didn’t violate platform rules.
“I asked her why boys keep doing that,” Bejar wrote to Zuckerberg and his top lieutenants. “She said if the only
thing that happens is they get blocked, why wouldn’t they?”
For the well-being of its users, Bejar argued, Meta needed to change course, focusing less on a flawed system of
rules-based policing and more on addressing such bad experiences. The company would need to collect data on
what upset users and then work to combat the source of it, nudging those who made others uncomfortable to
improve their behavior and isolating communities of users who deliberately sought to harm others.
Arturo Bejar left Facebook in 2015 for personal reasons
and returned four years later as a consultant on usersafety issues. PHOTO: IAN BATES FOR THE WALL
STREET JOURNAL
“I am appealing to you because I believe that working this
way will require a culture shift,” Bejar wrote to
Zuckerberg—the company would have to acknowledge
that its existing approach to governing Facebook and
Instagram wasn’t working. But Bejar declared himself
optimistic that Meta was up to the task: “I know that
everyone in m-team team deeply cares about the people
we serve,” he wrote, using Meta’s internal shorthand for
Zuckerberg and his top deputies.
Two years later, the problems Bejar identified remain unresolved, and new blind spots have emerged. The
company launched a sizable child-safety task force in June, following revelations that Instagram was cultivating
connections among large-scale networks of pedophilic users, an issue the company says it’s working to address.
This account is based on internal Meta documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, as well as interviews with
Bejar and current and former employees who worked with him during his stint at the company as a consultant.
Meta owns Facebook and Instagram.
Asked for comment for this article, Meta disputed Bejar’s assertion that it paid too little attention to user
experience and failed to sufficiently act on the findings of its Well-Being Team. During and after Bejar’s time as a
consultant, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said, the company has rolled out several product features meant to
address some of the Well-Being Team’s findings. Those features include warnings to users before they post
comments that Meta’s automated systems flag as potentially offensive, and reminders to be kind when sending
direct messages to users like content creators who receive a large volume of messages.
For a consultant, Bejar had unusually deep roots at the company. He had first been hired as a Facebook engineering
director in 2009. Responsible for protecting the platform’s users, he’d initially viewed the task as traditional
security work, building tools to detect hacking attempts, fight fraud rings and remove banned content.
Monitoring the posts of what was then Facebook’s 300 million-odd users wasn’t as simple as enforcing rules. There
was too much interaction on Facebook to police it all, and what upset users was often subjective.
Bejar loved the work, only leaving Facebook in 2015 because he was getting divorced and wanted to spend more
time with his children. Having joined the company long before its initial public offering, he had the resources to
spend the next few years on hobbies—including restoring vintage cars with his 14-year-old daughter, who
documented her new pastime on Instagram.
That’s when the trouble began. A girl restoring old cars drew plenty of good attention on the platform—and some
real creeps, such as the guy who told her that the only reason people watched her videos was “because you’ve got
tits.”
Zuckerberg changed Facebook’s name to Meta
Platforms in October 2021, days before Bejar’s twoyear consulting gig ended. PHOTO: CONSTANZA
HEVIA H. FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
“Please don’t talk about my underage tits,” Bejar’s
daughter shot back before reporting his comment to
Instagram. A few days later, the platform got back to
her: The insult didn’t violate its community guidelines.
Bejar was floored—all the more so when he learned
that virtually all of his daughter’s friends had been
subjected to similar harassment. “DTF?” a user they’d
never met would ask, using shorthand for a vulgar
proposition. Instagram acted so rarely on reports of
such behavior that the girls no longer bothered reporting them.
Bejar began peppering his former colleagues at Facebook with questions about what they were doing to address
such misbehavior. The company responded by offering him a two-year consulting gig.
That was how Bejar ended up back on Meta’s campus in the fall of 2019, working with Instagram’s Well-Being
Team. Though not high in the chain of command, he had unusual access to top executives—people remembered
him and his work.
From the beginning, there was a hurdle facing any effort to address widespread problems experienced by
Instagram users: Meta’s own statistics suggested that big problems didn’t exist.
During the four years Bejar had spent away from the company, Meta had come to approach governing user
behavior as an overwhelmingly automated process. Engineers would compile data sets of unacceptable content—
things like terrorism, pornography, bullying or “excessive gore”—and then train machine-learning models to
screen future content for similar material.
According to the company’s own metrics, the approach was tremendously effective. Within a few years, the
company boasted that 99% of the terrorism content that it took down had been removed without a user having
reported it. While users could still flag things that upset them, Meta shifted resources away from reviewing them.
To discourage users from filing reports, internal documents from 2019 show, Meta added steps to the reporting
process. Meta said the changes were meant to discourage frivolous reports and educate users about platform
rules.
The outperformance of Meta’s automated enforcement relied on what Bejar considered two sleights of hand. The
systems didn’t catch anywhere near the majority of banned content—only the majority of what the company
ultimately removed. As a data scientist warned Guy Rosen, Facebook’s head of integrity at the time, Meta’s
classifiers were reliable enough to remove only a low single-digit percentage of hate speech with any degree of
precision.
“Mark personally values freedom of expression first and foremost and would say this is a feature and not a bug,”
Rosen responded on Facebook’s internal communication platform.
Also buttressing Meta’s statistics were rules written narrowly enough to ban only unambiguously vile material.
Meta’s rules didn’t clearly prohibit adults from flooding the comments section on a teenager’s posts with kiss
emojis or posting pictures of kids in their underwear, inviting their followers to “see more” in a private Facebook
Messenger group.
Narrow rules and unreliable automated enforcement systems left a lot of room for bad behavior—but they made
the company’s child-safety statistics look pretty good according to Meta’s metric of choice: prevalence.
Defined as the percentage of content viewed worldwide that explicitly violates a Meta rule, prevalence was the
company’s preferred measuring stick for the problems users experienced. Yet Meta’s publicly released prevalence
numbers were invariably tiny. According to prevalence, child exploitation was so rare on the platform that it
couldn’t be reliably estimated, less than 0.05%, the threshold for functional measurement. Content deemed to
encourage self-harm, such as eating disorders, was just as minimal, and rule violations for bullying and harassment
occurred in just eight of 10,000 views.
“There’s a grading-your-own-homework problem,” said Zvika Krieger, a former director of responsible innovation
at Meta who worked with the Well-Being Team. “Meta defines what constitutes harmful content, so it shapes the
discussion of how successful it is at dealing with it.”
Proving to Meta’s leadership that the company’s prevalence metrics were missing the point was going to require
data the company didn’t have. So Bejar and a group of staffers from the Well-Being Team started collecting it.
Modeled on a recurring survey of Facebook users, the team built a new questionnaire called BEEF, short for “Bad
Emotional Experience Feedback.” A recurring survey of issues 238,000 users had experienced over the past seven
days, the effort identified problems with prevalence from the start: Users were 100 times more likely to tell
Instagram they’d witnessed bullying in the last week than Meta’s bullying-prevalence statistics indicated they
should.
“People feel like they’re having a bad experience or they don’t,” one presentation on BEEF noted. “Their perception
isn’t constrained by policy.”
While “bad experiences” were a problem for users across Meta’s platforms, they seemed particularly common
among teens on Instagram.
Among users under the age of 16, 26% recalled having a bad experience in the last week due to witnessing hostility
against someone based on their race, religion or identity. More than a fifth felt worse about themselves after
viewing others’ posts, and 13% had experienced unwanted sexual advances in the past seven days.
The initial figures had been even higher, but were revised down following a reassessment. Stone, the spokesman,
said the survey was conducted among Instagram users worldwide and did not specify a precise definition for
unwanted advances.
The vast gap between the low prevalence of content deemed problematic in the company’s own statistics and what
users told the company they experienced suggested that Meta’s definitions were off, Bejar argued. And if the
company was going to address issues such as unwanted sexual advances, it would have to begin letting users
“express these experiences to us in the product.”
Other teams at Instagram had already worked on proposals to address the sorts of problems that BEEF highlighted.
To minimize content that teenagers told researchers made them feel bad about themselves, Instagram could cap
how much beauty- and fashion-influencer content users saw. It could reconsider its AI-generated “beauty filters,”
which internal research suggested made both the people who used them and those who viewed the images more
self-critical. And it could build ways for users to report unwanted contacts, the first step to figuring out how to
discourage them.
One experiment run in response to BEEF data showed that when users were notified that their comment or post
had upset people who saw it, they often deleted it of their own accord. “Even if you don’t mandate behaviors,” said
Krieger, “you can at least send signals about what behaviors aren’t welcome.”
But among the ranks of Meta’s senior middle management, Bejar and Krieger said, BEEF hit a wall. Managers who
had made their careers on incrementally improving prevalence statistics weren’t receptive to the suggestion that
the approach wasn’t working.
Meta disputed that the company had rejected the Well-Being Team’s approach.
“It’s absurd to suggest we only started user perception surveys in 2019 or that there’s some sort of conflict
between that work and prevalence metrics,” Meta’s Stone said, adding that the company found value in each of the
approaches. “We take actions based on both and work on both continues to this day.”
Stone pointed to research indicating that teens face similar harassment and abuse offline.
In an email to Bejar, Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg said she
recognized that the misogyny his daughter faced was
withering. PHOTO: JACQUES DEMARTHON/AGENCE
FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
With the clock running down on his two-year consulting gig at
Meta, Bejar turned to his old connections. He took the BEEF
data straight to the top.
After three decades in Silicon Valley, he understood that
members of the company’s C-Suite might not appreciate a
damning appraisal of the safety risks young users faced from its
product—especially one citing the company’s own data.
“This was the email that my entire career in tech trained me not to send,” he says. “But a part of me was still hoping
they just didn’t know.”
With just weeks left at the company, Bejar emailed Zuckerberg, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Chief
Product Officer Chris Cox and Instagram head Adam Mosseri, blending the findings from BEEF with highly personal
examples of how the company was letting down users like his own daughter.
“Policy enforcement is analogous to the police,” he wrote in the email Oct. 5, 2021—arguing that it’s essential to
respond to crime, but that it’s not what makes a community safe. Meta had an opportunity to do right by its users
and take on a problem that Bejar believed was almost certainly industrywide.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri, Bejar said, acknowledged the
problem Bejar described. PHOTO: TOM WILLIAMS/ZUMA
PRESS
The timing of Bejar’s note was unfortunate. He sent it the same
day of the first congressional hearing featuring Frances Haugen, a
former Facebook employee who alleged that the company was
covering up internally understood ways that its products could
harm the health of users and undermine public discourse. Her
allegations and internal documents she took from Meta formed
the basis of the Journal’s Facebook Files series. Zuckerberg had
offered a public rebuttal, declaring that “the claims don’t make
any sense” and that both Haugen and the Journal had mischaracterized the company’s research into how Instagram
could under some circumstances corrode the self esteem of teenage girls.
In response to Bejar’s email, Sandberg sent a note to Bejar only, not the other executives. As he recalls it, she said
Bejar’s work demonstrated his commitment to both the company and his users. On a personal level, the author of
the hit feminist book “Lean In” wrote, she recognized that the misogyny his daughter faced was withering.
Mosseri wrote back on behalf of the group, inviting Bejar to come discuss his findings further. Bejar says he never
heard back from Zuckerberg.
In his remaining few weeks, Bejar worked on two final projects: drafting a version of the Well-Being Team’s work
for wider distribution inside Meta and preparing for a half-hour meeting with Mosseri.
As Bejar recalls it, the Mosseri talk went well. Though there would always be things to improve, Bejar recalled
Mosseri saying, the Instagram chief acknowledged the problem Bejar described, and said he was enthusiastic about
creating a way for users to report unwelcome contacts rather than simply blocking them.
“Adam got it,” Bejar said.
But Bejar’s efforts to share the Well-Being Team’s data and conclusions beyond the company’s executive ranks hit
a snag. After Haugen’s airing of internal research, Meta had cracked down on the distribution of anything that
would, if leaked, cause further reputational damage. With executives privately asserting that the company’s
research division harbored a fifth column of detractors, Meta was formalizing a raft of new rules for employees’
internal communication. Among the mandates for achieving “Narrative Excellence,” as the company called it, was
to keep research data tight and never assert a moral or legal duty to fix a problem.
After weeks of haggling with Meta’s communications and legal staff, Bejar secured permission to internally post a
sanitized version of what he’d sent Zuckerberg and his lieutenants. The price was that he omit all of the Well-Being
Team’s survey data.
“I had to write about it as a hypothetical,” Bejar said. Rather than acknowledging that Instagram’s survey data
showed that teens regularly faced unwanted sexual advances, the memo merely suggested how Instagram might
help teens if they faced such a problem.
Bejar emailed his user-safety findings to Zuckerberg
and other executives the same day former Facebook
employee Frances Haugen testified on Capitol Hill,
alleging that it was covering up risks the company knew
about. PHOTO: AL DRAGO/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Posting the watered down Well-Being research was
Bejar’s final act at the company. He left at the end of
October 2021, just days after Zuckerberg renamed the
company Meta Platforms.
Bejar left dispirited, but chose not to go public with his
concerns—his Well-Being Team colleagues were still
trying to push ahead, and the last thing they needed was
to deal with the fallout from another whistleblower, he told the Journal at the time.
The hope that the team’s work would continue didn’t last. The company stopped conducting the specific survey
behind BEEF, then laid off most everyone who’d worked on it as part of what Zuckerberg called Meta’s “year of
efficiency.”
If Meta was to change, Bejar told the Journal, the effort would have to come from the outside. He began consulting
with a coalition of state attorneys general who filed suit against the company late last month, alleging that the
company had built its products to maximize engagement at the expense of young users’ physical and mental health.
Bejar also got in touch with members of Congress about where he believes the company’s user-safety efforts fell
short.
He’s scheduled to testify in front of a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday.
Instagram makes teen accounts private as pressure
mounts to protect children
September 22, 2024 2:55 AM
By Associated Press
FILE - Students use their cellphones as they
leave for the day the Ramon C. Cortines
School of Visual and Performing Arts High
School in Los Angeles, California, Aug. 13,
2024.
Instagram is making teen accounts private
by default as it tries to make the platform
safer for children amid a growing backlash
against how social media affects young
people's lives.
Starting September 24, in the U.S., U.K.,
Canada and Australia, anyone under 18
who signs up for Instagram will be placed into a restrictive teen account. Those under 18 with existing accounts
will be migrated over the next 60 days. Teens in the European Union will see their accounts adjusted later this
year.
Parent company Meta acknowledges that teenagers may lie about their age and says it will require them to
verify their ages in more instances, like if they try to create a new account with an adult birthday. The
California-based U.S. company also said it is building technology that proactively finds teen accounts that
pretend to be grownups and automatically places them into restricted teen accounts.
The teen accounts will be private by default. Private messages are restricted so teens can only receive them
from people they follow or are already connected to. "Sensitive content" — such as videos of people fighting or
those promoting cosmetic procedures — will be limited, Meta said. Teens will also get notifications if they are
on Instagram for more than 60 minutes and a "sleep mode" will be enabled that turns off notifications and
sends auto-replies to direct messages from 10 p.m. until 7 a.m.
While these settings will be turned on for all teens, 16- and 17-year-olds will be able to turn them off. Kids
under 16 will need their parents' permission to do so.
"The three concerns we're hearing from parents are that their teens are seeing content that they don't want to
see or that they're getting contacted by people they don't want to be contacted by or that they're spending too
much time on the app," said Naomi Gleit, head of product at Meta. "So teen accounts is really focused on
addressing those three concerns."
Changes follow lawsuits
The announcement comes as the company faces lawsuits from dozens of U.S. states that accuse it of harming
young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing
features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.
While Meta didn't give specifics on how the changes might affect its business, the company said the changes
may mean that teens will use Instagram less in the short term. Emarketer analyst Jasmine Enberg said the
revenue impact of the changes "will likely be minimal."
"Even as Meta continues to prioritize teen safety, it's unlikely that it's going to make sweeping changes that
would cause a major financial hit," she said, adding that the teen accounts are unlikely to significantly affect
how engaged teens are with Instagram "not in the least because there are still plenty of ways to circumvent the
rules, and could even make them more motivated to work around the age limits."
'An important first step'
New York Attorney General Letitia James said Meta's announcement was "an important first step, but much
more needs to be done to ensure our kids are protected from the harms of social media." James' office is
working with other New York officials on how to implement a new state law intended to curb children's access
to what critics call addictive social media feeds.
Others were more critical. Nicole Gil, the co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Accountable Tech,
called Instagram's announcement the "latest attempt to avoid actual independent oversight and regulation and
instead continue to self-regulate, jeopardizing the health, safety, and privacy of young people."
"Today's PR exercise falls short of the safety by design and accountability that young people and their parents
deserve and only meaningful policy action can guarantee," she said. "Meta's business model is built on
addicting its users and mining their data for profit; no amount of parental and teen controls Meta is proposing
will change that."
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), the co-author of the Kids Online Safety Act that recently passed the Senate,
questioned the timing of the announcement "on the eve of a House markup" of the bill.
"Just like clockwork, the Kids Online Safety Act moves forward and industry comes out with a new set of selfenforcing guidelines," she said.
Parents privy to kids' accounts
In the past, Meta's efforts at addressing teen safety and mental health on its platforms have also been met with
criticism that the changes don't go far enough. For instance, while kids will get a notification when they've
spent 60 minutes on the app, they will be able to bypass it and continue scrolling.
That's unless the child's parents turn on "parental supervision" mode, where parents can limit teens' time on
Instagram to a specific amount of time, such as 15 minutes.
With the latest changes, Meta is giving parents more options to oversee their kids' accounts. Those under 16
will need a parent or guardian's permission to change their settings to less restrictive ones. They can do this by
setting up "parental supervision" on their accounts and connecting them to a parent or guardian.
Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, said last week that parents don't use the parental controls the
company has introduced in recent years.
Meta's Gleit said she thinks the teen accounts will incentivize parents to start using them.
"Parents will be able to see, via the family center, who is messaging their teen and hopefully have a
conversation with their teen," she said. "If there is bullying or harassment happening, parents will have
visibility into who their teen's following, who's following their teen, who their teen has messaged in the past
seven days and hopefully have some of these conversations and help them navigate these really difficult
situations online."
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said last year that tech companies put too much responsibility on parents
when it comes to keeping children safe on social media.
"We're asking parents to manage a technology that's rapidly evolving that fundamentally changes how their
kids think about themselves, how they build friendships, how they experience the world — and technology, by
the way, that prior generations never had to manage," Murthy said in May 2023.
How Australia Will (or Won’t) Keep Children Off Social
Media
Critics say big questions remain not only about how the new law will be enforced, but also about
whether the ban will really protect young people.
The New York Times Nov. 28, 2024
By Yan Zhuang
Australia has passed a law to prevent children under 16 from creating accounts on social media
platforms.
The bill, which the government calls a “world leading” move to protect young people online, was
approved in the Senate on Thursday with support from both of the country’s major parties. The lower
house of Parliament had passed it earlier in the week.
“This is about protecting young people — not punishing or isolating them,” said Michelle Rowland,
Australia’s communications minister. She cited exposure to content about drug abuse, eating
disorders and violence as some of the harms children can encounter online.
The legislation has broad support among Australians, and some parental groups have been vocal
advocates. But it has faced backlash from an unlikely alliance of tech giants, human rights groups and
social media experts.
Critics say there are major unanswered questions about how the law will be enforced, how users’
privacy will be protected and, fundamentally, whether the ban will actually protect children.
What’s in the law?
The law requires social media platforms to take “reasonable steps” to verify the age of users and
prohibit those under 16 from opening accounts.
Instagram’s New ‘Teen Accounts’
New privacy settings Instagram plans to default all new and existing accounts set up by people who
have indicated they are under 18 years old to “private mode.” Here’s what to know about the change.
What is ‘Private Mode’? With this change, an account holder must approve new followers before they
can see, like or comment on their posts. It would also turn off notifications between 10 p.m. and 7
a.m.
Are there age-specific changes? Account holders who are 16 or 17 will be able to make their
accounts public and change other default settings by themselves. But children under 16 will need a
parent’s permission to alter the privacy default, sleep mode and other restrictions.
Further protections The app will also limit sensitive content for minors, such as nudity or discussions
about self-harm, and prevent direct messages from people they don’t follow — existing restrictions
that the company had previously announced.
Can teens lie? Some teens may try to circumvent the privacy changes by setting up new Instagram
accounts with older birth dates. The app said it would require these users to verify their age in various
ways, such as by sending in a selfie video that will be analyzed by facial age estimation technology.
What is the parental supervision tool? Parents can use a supervision tool to set daily time limits on
their teen’s app's use. New features will include a list of people their child has recently messaged as
well as content topics their child has elected to see more of.
It does not specify which platforms the ban will cover — that will be decided later — but the
government has named TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, Instagram and X as sites it is likely to
include.
Three broad categories of platforms will be exempt: messaging apps (like WhatsApp and Facebook’s
Messenger Kids); gaming platforms; and services that provide educational content, including
YouTube. Those 15 and under will also still be able to access platforms that let users see some content
without registering for an account, like TikTok, Facebook and Reddit.
Ms. Rowland, the communications minister, said the restriction on creating accounts, rather than on
content more broadly, would mitigate harms associated with online life — like “persistent
notifications and alerts” that could affect young people’s sleep and ability to focus — while limiting the
law’s effect on the broader population. And supporters of the ban say that delaying children’s
exposure to the many pressures of social media would allow them the time to develop a more “secure
identity,” while taking pressure off parents to police their children’s online activity.
But digital media experts and some parental groups have said that the patchwork nature of which
platforms will and won’t be included in the ban makes it unclear what exactly it is meant to protect
children from.
A more effective approach would be to address the problem at its root by requiring social media
companies to do a better job of moderating and removing harmful content, said Lisa Given, a
professor of information sciences at RMIT University in Melbourne.
The new law “does not protect children against potential harms on social media,” Professor Given
said. “In fact, it could create other problems by excluding young people from helpful and useful
information, as well as opening up a number of privacy concerns for all Australians.”
How will it be enforced?
That’s not yet entirely clear. The bill states that social media companies must take reasonable steps to
assess users’ ages, but the platforms are left to decide how to do that. Those that don’t comply could
be fined up to 49.5 million Australian dollars (about $32 million).
In a measure that was added in response to privacy concerns, the law states that providing a
government-issued identity document cannot be the only option social media platforms give users for
verifying their age.
Other methods the government has suggested include so-called age assurance technologies, like using
a facial scan to determine a user’s approximate age, or estimating it based on online behavior.
Some of those technologies are already being tried. Facebook, for example, is teaching A.I. to estimate
users’ ages by looking at things like the birthday messages they receive. The Australian government is
conducting its own trial of such tools, and the results will inform how it defines the “reasonable steps”
that social media platforms must take.
But Daniel Angus, the director of the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of
Technology, said it was unrealistic for the government to base its law, even in part, on that kind of
technology, which is often driven by A.I., largely still in development and in no way foolproof. He
added that “there are huge, huge privacy concerns around these, huge tracking concerns. All of this
allows, in some way, the ability to track users online.”
What has the response been?
Polls show that the majority of Australians favor the ban. Parental groups have been broadly
supportive — although some say the law does not go far enough and should cover more platforms.
Some parents who blame social media for their children’s deaths have been particularly vocal
campaigners for a ban, such as Kelly O’Brien, who said that her 12-year-old daughter, Charlotte, died
by suicide after experiencing bullying on and off social media.
“Giving our kids these phones, we’re giving them weapons, we’re giving them the world at their
fingertips,” Ms. O’Brien told an Australian news outlet.
Social media companies have criticized the law. Elon Musk, the owner of X, said on the platform that
it “seems like a backdoor way to control access to the internet by all Australians.”
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said the proposal “overlooks the practical
reality of age assurance technology, as well as the views of a majority of mental health and youth
safety organizations in the country.”
(LinkedIn argued that it should not fall within the scope of the ban because, in part, it “simply does
not have content interesting and appealing to minors.”)
Some commentators have described the ban as performative. “The primary use of this legislation —
let’s not pretend otherwise — is to make it look like our Parliament is taking a stand,” Annabel Crabb,
a top journalist at Australia’s national broadcaster, wrote.
Human rights groups have also raised concerns.
Exhibit 1
Meta Platform Stock Price 2013 - 2025
Source: 2026 Yahoo Finance
Exhibit 2
CAGR 40%
Exhibit 3
Meta Platforms Net Income 2008-2024
CAGR 42%
Exhibit 4
Exhibit 5
Exhibit 6
Most popular social networks worldwide in monthly active usage
Source: Statista, February 2025