By Thomas Maxwell Published January 25, 2025 | Comments (0) | Early data suggests Meta's controversial policy changes have not impacted usage. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Metas recent right-wing tilt prompted plenty of people to declare they were ditching the companys 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 engagement on Metas core apps is similar now to what it was before the company announced it would replace third-party fact-checkers with community notes and roll back its DEI initiatives. Meta has more than 3 billion daily active users globally across its platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. It is hard to break free from network effectsif all your friends and family all use WhatsApp, its not so simple to ditch the app. And for businesses, Meta has the most effective ad targeting apparatus in the world, perhaps only rivaling Google. X, formerly Twitter, saw a big decline in advertising 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. Moreover, the U.S. population is not even a sixth of Metas overall userbaseFacebook remains quite popular outside the U.S., despite sentiment here that it is dead. Its political maneuverings in the U.S. may not be relevant to people in other parts of the world. Though advertisers typically spend more money reaching users in America than anywhere else, the massive global userbase certainly helps insulate it. And it seems Meta saw an increase in spending on in-app purchases after the policy changes: After looking at the download and revenue data for Metas social apps, I was unable to detect any substantial or out-of-the-ordinary decline, Randy Nelson, the head of insights at App Figures, told BI. In fact, in some cases there were increases, he said. App Figures comparison of the 13 days before and after Metas announcement to end fact-checking shows that US in-app purchases on Metas platforms grew to $1.9 million for Facebook and $3 million for Instagram, representing increases of 5% and 3%, respectively. It helps that TikToks fate in the U.S. remains in limbo:Apptopia data found that Facebooks daily active users, which had been down about 2% year-over-year for most of January, began showing year-over-year growth on January 18, as speculation intensified ahead of a Supreme Court decision on TikTok. Instagram saw an even stronger rebound, with DAUs rising on January 18 and continuing to grow above the previous years numbers on both January 19 and 20. Ever since President Trump won reelection in November, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on a full-court press to win over the administration following an acrimonious relationship during his first term. Republicans have attacked Meta for allegedly censoring conservative voices, even though conservative-leaning content has long dominated on Facebook. But Zuckerberg is a consummate businessman and does not want to spend four years being retaliated against, so he, along with other tech executives, have done everything they can to show allegiance to the White House. He notoriously did not like being in the business of fact-checking and moderating content anyway, implementing a pseudo-independent Oversight Council years ago to take over some of the responsibility. Trumps presidency gives him an easy out. It is important to keep in mind that Meta is not getting rid of content moderation altogether. It will still remove content over bullying, harassment, and other conduct that violates its policies. And fact-checking, whatever you think of it, seems to have been ineffective at swaying users opinions as they came to distrust or simply ignore the labels. But it seems certain Meta apps will become more of a cesspool than they already are, as fact-checking is replaced with crowdsourced notes (which can be slow to propagate) and users are permitted to write things they could not in the past, such as that homosexuality is a mental illness and all undocumented immigrants are criminals.It may be too early to say whether or not users will leave Meta apps en-masse, but be skeptical.Daily NewsletterYou May Also Like By Lucas Ropek Published January 22, 2025 By Matthew Gault Published January 14, 2025 By Kyle Barr Published January 14, 2025 By Thomas Maxwell Published January 13, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published January 10, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published January 9, 2025