Meta Apps - Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Threads

Toronto, Canada - August 1, 2023: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads -- apps by Meta Platforms Inc. on an Apple iPhone.

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The number of people using Meta apps just fell for the first time in seven years

The company shed 20 million “daily active people” across its app family in the first quarter.

Tom Jones

4/30/26 10:04AM

There was a lot for Meta investors to dig into from the company’s first quarterly report of the 2026 fiscal year on Wednesday, as earnings, revenue, and (less pleasingly) projected capex spending all came in ahead of Wall Street expectations.

With all the talk around ballooning data center outlay and Meta’s artificial intelligence ambitions — there were 49 references to “AI” on its earnings call yesterday — it can be easy to lose sight of what’s still at the heart of the Meta business: messaging, watching, liking, and doomscrolling across its core apps. Though for this quarter, at least, a little less focus on those might be no bad thing, with the number of total daily users across Meta apps falling for the first time since it started breaking out the metric seven years ago.

What’s appening?

According to Zuckerberg on Wednesday’s earnings call, the number of “total family dailies,” basically anyone who’s registered and logged in across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and I guess Threads, slipped from the end of last year. Meta’s CEO laid the blame with internet outages in Iran and blocks in Russia, insisting that, otherwise, “trends across our apps are strong.”

Geopolitical complications as may be, the drop still marked the social media giant’s first quarterly decline since it started breaking out the top-line metric in 2019, wiping 20 million daily users from its still staggering 3.5 billion+ tally.

While some mild skepticism around Meta’s reasoning for the slipping figure has cropped up and more persists around its reasoning for bundling its app user metrics together more broadly, the decline is a drop in the ocean for its family of mega apps, having grown its daily active people base from 2.1 billion at the start of 2019 to 3.56 billion at the end of Q1.

It also didn't stop the company from managing to monetize those eyeballs to an insane level, raking in a staggering $55 billion in advertising revenue across the first quarter, up 33% from a year earlier.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5