The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 80 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Rogers: Previous administration pressured Twitter and Meta to censor posts
“Under the prior administration included things like global engagement center censorship efforts that were the subject of the Murphy Supreme Court litigation, where the State Department Along with other organs of the executive branch would contact Twitter or Me…”
Horowitz: Facebook internal probe found virtually no evidence of Russian hacking
“You know, what they found in terms of the quote-unquote Russian hacking was just about effectively nothing. Like, there was nothing. And so, but the dominant media narrative Was that Facebook had been hacked by the Russians, and I think like probably half the …”
Marc Andreessen: Russian Facebook ad spend during 2016 election was only $80,000
“I think the result of it was, I think it was a result of 80,000 dollars of ad spend by the Russians in, in the relevant period of the election. It was like a total of like a 140,000, but during the actual run of the election, it was 80,000 dollars, and so the …”
Andreessen: The EU AI Act has largely killed AI development in Europe
“The EU passed this bill called the AI Act, I don't know, whatever, two years ago, and it basically has killed AI development, and, well, it's actually killed AI development in Europe to a large extent and then it even, it is so draconian that even, Even big Am…”
Evans: Claude has virtually no consumer usage despite top benchmark scores
“It's basically, the only consumer, Claude has basically no consumer usage, even though on the benchmark score it's the same. And then it's ChatGPT, and then halfway down the chart, it's Meta and Google.”
Andreessen: Journalist advised Zuckerberg to accept $1B Yahoo acquisition offer
“Facebook got just tons of, you know, it's just like this is the most trivial, stupid, useless, you know, thing that doesn't matter, you know, Facebook, there was almost a deal for Facebook to get bought by Yahoo early on, and I remember a certain very prominen…”
Meta Internal Studies Show In-Office Employees Outperform Native Remote Hires
“Some studies are sort of coming out meta is sort of saying like they've noticed that people are back at the office three days a week are more effective, or if they've already been in the office for a while before they went out on remote versus native remote”
Dixon: VCs will not fund third-party tools for closed platforms
“You will not see any VC. We have not funded. No one will fund an anti-spam solution for Twitter or Facebook.”
Jordan: Premier networks like Facebook and WhatsApp skip paid user acquisition
“A lot of the best networks that are platformed here aren't spending anything on, on acquisition. I mean, it's just, it's kind of an interesting thing in marketplace. Facebook, no. WhatsApp, no. Medium, no. You know, just OpenTable, no. Just, you know, just, th…”
Evans: Apple and Facebook will build full-stack VR while Google commoditizes hardware
“You'll have Apple and Facebook trying to do the full stack, and you'll have Google saying, well, we're going to provide the hard bit, and everything else will be a commodity around it.”
Evans: Global annual photos taken likely reaches 10 to 100 trillion
“Even if you just add up the numbers from Facebook and Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and so on, you get to about eight or nine hundred billion photographs taken last year. And that's just, sorry, shared. So if there were eight or nine hundred bi…”
Rowan: Tech and industrial giants dominate private investment grade issuance
“But if you think of the largest issuers of private investment grade, it's Intel, it's Air France, it's EDF, it's AT&T, it's Meta, it's BP Energy, and so on, and you're hearing lots of public companies.”
Zuckerberg: Meta protein researchers led by Alex Rives join CZI
“We actually had a bunch of researchers who'd formerly worked at Meta on protein folding models is joining a biohub and Alex Reeves, the leader of it is actually going to be the kind of head of the whole science program”
Rose: Digg Had More Web Traffic Than Facebook in Mid-2000s
“At that time we were larger than Facebook. And so traffic wise”
Ulevitch: Meta contracted nearly all power from Constellation's reactivated nuclear reactor
“I mean, I think that Constellation just turned up a new nuclear reactor, or is reactivating a reactor, and I think Meta immediately sucked up all of the power that they're going to generate, or nine 10th of it, or something from the new Constellation reactor t…”
Andreessen: Yahoo price cut gave Zuckerberg cover to reject $1B offer
“Yahoo came back and essentially renegotiated the deal, tried to lower the price. And that gave Mark basically the, you know, I don't know, cover, kind of wherewithal to be able to walk away from the deal.”
George: Consumer AI reached one billion users faster than any predecessor
“We've now gotten to the point where there's about a billion monthly active users of consumer AI applications, and this has grown significantly faster than predecessor companies, Google, Facebook, TikTok, and in the case of TikTok, they actually grew through, t…”
Immerman: Meta AI services have reached 500 million monthly active users
“Meta's not far behind. They have five hundred million monthly active users.”
Khalaf: Payment cards have wider reach than Google, Facebook, and clean water
“Because if you think about a payment card, it's the most adopted technological product ever invented. More distribution than Google and Facebook combined. More distribution than clean water. And it's still a piece of plastic for many.”
Andreessen: Meta spends roughly $20 billion annually on VR
“Facebook's now in a position where Facebook's, you know, spending, you know, on the order of twenty billion dollars a year on VR, right?”
Hicks: DoD R&D budget exceeds Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Microsoft combined
“It's more than what Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft combined spent on R&D last year.”
Conde: Facebook recruitment reduced Parkinson's trial acquisition costs by 96%
“A great data point that I heard recently was a partnership that Facebook made with the Michael J. Fox foundation to find ways to pilot the use of social networks to recruit patients for Parkinson's disease trial using social media. They were able to reduce the…”
Ehrsam: Ethereum throughput is 20,000x short of running Facebook
“And if you look at what Ethereum is capable of in terms of just throughput of the network, it can't handle more than about twenty-ish transactions a second right now, which means that you're about 20,000 X off being able to run Facebook on the chain.”
Chen: 25% of Facebook developers write deep learning code
“If you look at something like FB Learner Flow, which is Facebook's Automation workflow system for artificial intelligence. They've gotten it so good that 25% of their total software developer universe is writing deep learning. 25%, right?”
Unicode Voting Power Concentrated Among US Tech Giants, SAP, and Oman
“No, so of those 12, so of those 12, nine are U.S. Multinational tech companies. Oracle, IBM, Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Facebook, Microsoft, and Symantec. Then of the other three full voting members, one is the German software company SAP, another is the Chinese te…”
Jordan: Zuckerberg pre-populated Facebook by hacking Harvard house directories
“He hacked the directories in each of the houses, and so he pre-populated everyone on the Harvard campus into Facebook and then let people claim their identities, but you could then friend, it was populated when the first person showed up.”
Instagram intentionally targeted photographers and designers at launch, says Bailey Richardson
“From my perspective of at least how we grew Instagram, we started out with this core audience of people that were photographers and designers, and that's actually who we went and spoke to when we released the app, and who we promoted right away, because we fel…”
Evans: Apple, Google, and Facebook Won Initial Mobile and Messaging Wars
“The smartphone wars are now over, or at least the first smartphone war is over, and Apple and Google both won in different ways, and the kind of the first messaging app wars are now mostly over, and Facebook mostly won in sort of various ways”
Andreessen: All 59 US private tech unicorns combined equal one Facebook
“There's like 59 U.S. Tech companies that are private and are worth more than a billion dollars. If you add them all up, they're worth about one Facebook.”
Conde: Facebook reduced clinical trial patient recruitment costs by 96%
“So Facebook, for example, as I mentioned earlier, is using their social network to help us identify and recruit patients for clinical trials. And in fact, they did a pilot project with the Michael J. Fox foundation where they were able to reduce the cost and t…”
Evans: Google and Facebook captured half of print's internet ad revenue
“Internet took about half of the print industry's advertising revenue and growing, but Google and Facebook took half of that.”
Evans: Facebook is the world's largest mobile web browser
“So, 15 to 20% of mobile time spent is actually happening inside Facebook, which makes it the world's largest mobile web browser.”
Evans: Combined GAFA revenues remain smaller than TV and advertising
“Even Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon combined there, or GAFA, as the telecoms industry tends to call them add up to less than TV business or advertising and are much, much smaller than mobile or proper, proper industries like cars or clothes.”
Evans: Big Tech produces more profits than the entire telecoms industry
“You have a pretty safe bet that Google, Meta, Amazon Microsoft, Apple produce more profits than the entire telecoms industry.”
Moore: Meta Acquired AI Agent Startup Manus for Over $2B
“They had a two billion dollar plus acquisition by Meta, also in the course of the list.”
Bosworth says Ray-Ban Meta Live AI feature drains battery in 30 minutes
“So you can start a live AI session with your Ray-Ban meted glasses. And for 30 minutes until the battery runs out, It is, it's seeing what you're seeing.”
Horowitz: Tech companies no longer restrict engineering hiring to elite universities
“I think Facebook, you're on the board of Meta. They used to only hire people from Stanford and MIT, or I think, or Harvard, Stanford, MIT. Like they had like strict rules on them. Nobody has that role anymore. Like that role's gone. Like, I don't know any comp…”
Ismail: Tech winners like Apple and Google succeeded by becoming platforms
“Yahoo, BlackBerry, Nokia all failed to become platforms, right? Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon all successfully became platforms, and that business model basically carries you through because now you wire yourself into the infrastructure.”
Jordan: Facebook has completely saturated its US user growth
“Facebook Hasn't had any users in the U.S. Forever because they have them all.”
Evans: Founders control all top tech giants except Apple
“And they all, except for Apple, the founders control the company.”
Russell: Current BCI tech will allow seamless thought-controlled computer actions
“And now with this current generation, it seems like between Elon, Facebook, probably something from Google that We're actually going to start to see these things that kind of invisibly actually just let you think something and have some kind of action show up …”
Jordan: Early PayPal and Facebook social commerce partnerships failed to gain traction
“PayPal did a few deals in back at the beginning of the decade with the Facebook and, you know, felt like, okay, there you have money there. You have social graph. We have social commerce, right? Well, it just, it hasn't worked that way.”
Three College Social Networks Existed Before Facebook Launched at Harvard
“Look, there was three college social networks that came before Facebook, but it was the first one started at Harvard.”
Khanna: Average Facebook user's international friends rose to 15-16%
“If you look at the number of, for example, international friends that people have on Facebook, it used to be only, you know, four or five percent of an average person's friends were from another country, and now it's risen to like 15 or 16%.”
Messina: Facebook beat Apple Pay to web checkout integration
“And they beat Apple pay to the web, which I think is, is hugely important for the developing world and for people who live in environments that are not at all like ours.”
Jordan: Facebook's growth stalled four times prior to going public
“Facebook's growth stopped like four times before it became a public company.”