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.
And replacement for emergency services alerts, which is more a function of failed governance. Parts of Colorado use Facebook and Xitter for emergency/storm/flood and NWS alerts. Not, you know, emergency alert systems. They even recommend on the news to check socials for exact location info for storms, like the one that decimated Yuma with hail or the one that flooded Greely, all in the last 2 weeks.