Meta
also referred to as: facebook
includes Facebook Messenger, Facebook Home, Facebook Live, Facebook Shops
104 statements across 45 episodes · 9 bullish · 37 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Oct 11, 2020 by Benedict Evans · said 636 times in 77 episodes since 2020 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Benedict Evans (577), Toni Cowan-Brown (51), Bernadette Kevins (6), Lillian Li (2)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 25 mentions in 4 episodes 6 per episode
2025 28 mentions in 4 episodes 7 per episode
2024 30 mentions in 6 episodes 5 per episode
2023 101 mentions in 13 episodes 8 per episode
2022 127 mentions in 22 episodes 6 per episode
2021 191 mentions in 19 episodes 10 per episode
- The Meta reality
- Trying to understand Ad Tech
- Regulation - Who will notice?
- Tech in china, from inside and outside
- The history of doom-scrolling
- There's no such thing as data
- Clubhouse and the endless cycle of social apps
- Two Europeans talk about China
- 11 more episodes that year, every mention in 2021 →
2020 134 mentions in 9 episodes 15 per episode
- The FTC and Facebook
- What the Apple and Facebook events tell us about their product cycles
- Is content moderation a dead end?
- How do you destroy a tech monopoly?
- Is Europe a market?
- Slack, Salesforce and the future of work
- What comes next?
- The paradox of Apple
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2020 →
Everything said about Meta, oldest first
Oct 11, 2020 neutral
Evans: Lacking a US privacy regulator, Apple and Google write the rules
“The US doesn't have a privacy regulator. And so Facebook, Apple on one level, you know, Apple and Google are remaking the ad tech industries. And so they're doing privacy regulation. Apple is doing privacy regulation and what you can do on the phone. Facebook …”
Oct 19, 2020 neutral
Facebook aims to bootstrap VR into mainstream existence via gaming
“What they're trying to do is they're trying to kind of pull VR into existence out of thin air through force of will by pushing it out into the market and getting it to bootstrap. And maybe the theory is, well, we can get to some scale with games. And then once…”
Oct 19, 2020 neutral
Oct 19, 2020 positive
Facebook iterated VR hardware publicly to reach mainstream consumers
“Whereas what you see from Facebook in a very different environment is they're trying to make VR work, and, you know, VR, we had a first coming of VR in the late eighties and early nineties, and obviously the technology wasn't up to it, and then Sort of seven, …”
Oct 19, 2020 neutral
Nov 2, 2020 negative
Evans: Heavy platform regulation protects incumbents like Facebook from startups
“Part of the point of regulation is that it's expensive and it helps incumbents.
You know, if you, Facebook has whatever it is, 30, 40,000 human moderators. If you create a law that says if you have a social network, a human being has to look at every post, wel…”
Nov 9, 2020 bearish
Evans: Breaking Up Facebook Only Relocates Moderation Power to Five Companies
“Now you could argue that's, that means that you should just break up Facebook, but that just relocates the problem because it's now it's five people collectively who are making that decision instead of one, but the decision is still there.”
Nov 9, 2020 negative
Nov 9, 2020 negative
Evans: Facebook generates trivial revenue from news content
“All my friends at Facebook would basically say, we wish we didn't have news at all. We don't make any money from it. We actually don't make any money from news, although the amount of money is trivial. It's a huge amount of pain and aggravation”
Nov 9, 2020 neutral
Evans: Big internet platforms operate as Mechanical Turks powered by human biases
“You should think of any big internet platform as basically a Mechanical Turk. So PageRank is a Mechanical Turk. Because PageRank, the whole point of PageRank is instead of trying to work out what that webpage is, Probably should have said this earlier. Instead…”
Nov 9, 2020 neutral
Evans: Private platform moderation affecting billions is a free speech issue
“Well, it's a private corporation that controls how billions of people talk to each other. If they decide that billions of people can't say that, that is ipse fact to a free speech question. Doesn't matter that they're not the government or not.”
Nov 9, 2020 neutral
Evans: Online harms stem from total connectivity, not algorithms or ads
“A couple of years ago, there was this whole thing in India of lynch mobs forming based on wild rumors that were spreading on WhatsApp, which was super interesting because WhatsApp is not, doesn't have an algorithm and doesn't have advertising. And so like thos…”
Nov 9, 2020
Evans: Content moderation is unscalable without architectural constraints
“The creation of bad stuff is fundamentally infinitely scalable, because it's people. It's four billion people saying, retweeting stuff that fits their prejudices. And the content moderation or the virus scanning is fundamentally unscalable, because you're one …”
Dec 13, 2020 neutral
Evans: Facebook would engage in the same practices without Instagram or WhatsApp
“Supposing WhatsApp didn't happen, supposing Instagram hadn't happened, supposing they'd happened and failed, supposing they'd happened, gotten bought by Fox, rolled into MySpace and killed. And so Facebook was the only thing. And Facebook would be doing all th…”
Dec 13, 2020 neutral
Evans: Spinning off Instagram or YouTube will not make competing easier
“If Instagram was a separate company, that wouldn't make it easier to compete with them. Because the network effects that make it hard to compete with Instagram are part of Instagram. They don't come from it being owned by Facebook. The same thing with YouTube.…”
Dec 13, 2020 negative
Benedict Evans: Search and social networks are natural monopolies like water utilities
“There are clearly structural reasons why it's very hard to create a new search engine or to create a new social network. There are very strong network effects, which I, the last, one of the last pieces I wrote, I described as basically a natural monopoly. And …”
Dec 13, 2020 negative
Dec 13, 2020 negative
Evans: FTC knew Instagram was a competitive threat when approving acquisition
“The FTC basically knew everything that they knew, know, that they know now. They knew that these were competitive. They knew that Facebook must see them as competitive threats. Nothing's actually changed, except that the FTC has just changed their mind. And I …”
Dec 13, 2020 neutral
Evans: TikTok competes with YouTube rather than Instagram due to graph mechanics
“I would actually argue that Instagram is about people you choose to follow, and mostly people you know, whereas TikTok is about people you don't know. It's a completely different graph, and it's a recommendation-based graph, not a people you've met-based graph…”
Dec 13, 2020 negative
Evans: Antitrust fines lack deterrent value due to decade-long enforcement lags
“The enforcement is so disconnected from the original decision that, like, nobody who's actually Nobody who's making those decisions understands that in 10 years' time they'll be defined as a monopoly. I mean, they're arguing about it now. You know, there's peo…”
Dec 13, 2020 negative
Evans: Breaking up Instagram or YouTube would not reduce harmful content
“If Instagram was a separate company, that wouldn't have any effect on teenage girls looking at self-harm content on Instagram. If YouTube was a separate company, that wouldn't have any effect on the prevalence of jihadi content. That's not a competition proble…”
Dec 22, 2020 neutral
Google and Facebook Will Face Regulation Like Banks and Telcos
“You are going to get regulated like a telco or a bank. You know, if you work at Google or you work at Facebook, you are going to have the same kind of scrutiny that a telco or a bank have. And it doesn't really matter if you think you shouldn't. That's just wh…”
Jan 3, 2021 neutral
Jan 3, 2021 negative
Jan 10, 2021 bearish
Jan 10, 2021 neutral
Evans: Facebook's targeted advertising does not sell user data to advertisers
“Facebook sells your data. Okay, what does Facebook do? You're an advertiser, you go on Facebook, you say, I want to show an ad for a playgroup to mothers in Cardiff, and I've got 500 pounds to spend. Okay, we'll show that ad to 500 people that we, to a thousan…”
Jan 17, 2021 negative
Jan 17, 2021 neutral
Benedict Evans: China tech features horizontal competition, unlike Western vertical champions
“Which is that China has sort of many champions that compete with each other across many fields. Whereas, you know, Google doesn't have an e-commerce delivery business, and it doesn't really have a social network. And Amazon doesn't have a social network or a s…”
Jan 24, 2021 neutral
Feb 14, 2021 negative
Evans: Saying Facebook won social is like saying Condé Nast won magazines
“The idea that like, well, Facebook is one has won social is about as dumb as saying that like Condé Nast is one has won magazines. In like, Vogue is one, there's no more magazines. Yeah, like, no, there'll be other things that aren't Vogue, and that's sort of …”
Mar 14, 2021
Evans: The global ad market is $600B with half spent online
“Firstly, here is, like, the global advertising industry this year is probably 606 hundred Fifty billion dollars, and at least half of that is online, and that pays for a very large chunk of all the stuff that we use, including Google and Facebook and Twitter, …”
Mar 14, 2021 neutral
Evans: Google and Facebook hold at least two-thirds of online advertising
“So something like half of online advertising is search, which means, mostly means Google. And then like another maybe 10 or 20%, I'm picking these numbers from memory, is Facebook. So Google and Facebook, between them, have at least two-thirds of online advert…”
Mar 14, 2021 neutral
Jun 21, 2021 neutral
Evans: The claim that Facebook sells user data is factually untrue
“I think the phrase Facebook sells your data is fascinating here, not primarily because it's just factually untrue, but because it's sort of an attempt to come up with a clearer way of describing what somebody thinks the problem is.”
Jun 21, 2021 neutral
Evans: Cookie Deprecation Only Truly Impacts One-Third of Digital Advertising
“The whole cookie apocalypse thing and the privacy thing and all of this stuff is actually only about sort of a quarter to a third of online advertising because there's YouTube. Which is where video advertising is, there's, well, let me put it another way, ther…”
Jun 29, 2021 negative
Jun 29, 2021 neutral
Evans: Western tech produces vertical winners, whereas Chinese tech produces horizontal empires
“The sort of text structure in The rest of the world is you tend to have vertical winners. So Google won search, and there's a couple of other people trying to do search. Amazon won sort of generalized e-commerce, not market-specific e-commerce, won general e-c…”
Sep 28, 2021 negative
Oct 18, 2021 bearish
Evans: Facebook cannot centrally build the metaverse
“And now you hear people at Facebook saying, well, we're going to build the metaverse. It's like sitting down in 1994 and saying, well, now we're going to build the web. You know, it's like news corporate, it's like news corporation in 1994 saying, oh, well, wh…”
Nov 2, 2021 neutral
Evans: Facebook bought WhatsApp primarily to keep it from competitors
“WhatsApp is this sort of weird thing off by its side that isn't really part of, certainly not part of the US conversation, and doesn't have an ad business, and so it's a slightly weird thing that they bought to stop someone else getting it.”
Nov 2, 2021 negative
Nov 2, 2021 negative
Nov 2, 2021 neutral
Nov 2, 2021 neutral
Nov 2, 2021 neutral
Evans: Rebranding a toxic brand fails without fixing underlying problems
“If your brand is bad, or uncool, or toxic, or whatever, and you change the brand, if you haven't actually fixed the reasons why the brand was toxic, then those things will just leach into the new brand, and you won't fool anyone.”
Nov 8, 2021 neutral
Nov 15, 2021 neutral
Evans: Public wants Facebook to moderate content more, not less
“And I'm not sure there's very many people on earth who think the problem with Facebook is that it controls too much about what happens on Facebook. Almost everyone would say it's exactly the opposite problem, that it doesn't control enough.”
Feb 18, 2022 neutral
Apr 11, 2022 neutral
Evans: Big Tech exits markets that require manual labor instead of software
“They want to turn it, particularly for Google, Facebook, Amazon, they want to turn it into automated self-service software. And if it turns out that you kind of can't do that, and you need a bunch of salespeople, or you need a bunch of offices, or you need a b…”
Apr 11, 2022 negative
Aug 1, 2022 negative
Evans: The idea that Big Tech buys up all startups is nonsense
“And they're actually a very small percentage of all the acquisition, all the startups in the field, or indeed all of the exits, because, you know, I think it was something like 60 or 70 of those 400 were more than fifty million dollars, which is the point that…”
Aug 1, 2022 bullish
Aug 1, 2022 bearish
Evans: Meta's purchase of Within was likely a low-priced soft landing
“And I have no information on this at all, but I strongly suspect that that means it wasn't really working and they didn't pay very much for it because when stuff works and it's a big deal and you hear about it and I kind of suspect this was a soft landing or a…”
Aug 1, 2022 neutral
Aug 1, 2022
Aug 23, 2022 neutral
Evans: Modern tech company returns occur mostly in private markets pre-IPO
“Tech companies of the eighties and nineties, like 80 or 90% of the returns to investors came in after the IPO. Let's say IPO at a hundred million dollars, and then they end up being a fifty billion dollar company. Whereas for something like Google or Facebook …”
Sep 5, 2022 neutral
Evans: Streaming platform scale is driven by content budget, not network effects
“The challenge is like, there's no network effect there. It's a budget effect. It's not like Facebook where everyone, it's not that, it's not like Facebook where everyone has to use WhatsApp because everyone's on WhatsApp.”
Sep 5, 2022 negative
Sep 19, 2022 neutral
Sep 19, 2022 neutral
Evans: Founders wanting autonomy shouldn't take $20 billion acquisitions
“Yeah, you're going to reach a point where, like, if you didn't want to be part of Adobe, then you shouldn't have taken the fucking twenty billion dollars. Which was always the problem with WhatsApp. Like, and yes, there were all sorts of things about broken pr…”
Oct 31, 2022 positive
Benedict Evans: Meta's massive VR spend builds nonexistent hardware supply chains
“It's like, that's kind of why they're spending all this money, because they realize now actually there isn't all the stuff you need to get VR working actually isn't sort of already there waiting to be plugged together the way smartphones kind of work.
and s…”
Oct 31, 2022 bearish
Nov 29, 2022 bullish
Evans: Amazon ad revenue makes it a top-four global media owner
“And they did, I think, thirty one billion dollars last year, and they've done like 36, thirty seven billion dollars in the last 12 months which gets them to being like a top three, top four media owner. Globally. It's like Alphabet, Meta, ByteDance and then I …”
Dec 11, 2022
Evans: Tech markets consolidate via S-curves where incremental improvements cannot win
“The competitive threat in tech is generally not someone doing the same thing as you, but better. Or let me kind of qualify that. Each market sort of goes for an S-curve, and there's like an early period where everyone's fighting it out to win. So this is like …”
Dec 11, 2022 negative
Evans: UK CMA forcing Meta to unwind Giphy was an over-rotation
“And so that gets you to, for example, the UK CMA making Meta unwind its acquisition of Giphy, which I don't think anybody thinks is like a market in its own right, but they thought, and I think I would argue that was sort of over-rotation the other way.”
Dec 11, 2022 neutral
Evans: FTC Meta-Within case is very aggressive; Activision case is much less aggressive
“I think within is kind of a test case to try and push the you know, really kind of move the flag post, move the goal much further over. You know, it's a very aggressive case. I think the Activision case is actually much less aggressive.”
Dec 11, 2022 bearish
Dec 11, 2022 negative
Mar 20, 2023
Evans: TikTok fundamentally competes with YouTube, not Instagram or Facebook.
“I think there's a sort of it's almost like an incorrect analysis, which was, I'm trying to think of the right word, which is like, we kind of went down the line of thinking that TikTok competed with Instagram and Facebook, as opposed to thinking that it compet…”
Mar 27, 2023 neutral
Evans: AI summarizing news without links raises deeper issues than search engines
“If you're going to, you know, build a new system that will just tell you what the story was without linking or giving you credit, that's very different from you know, what Google and Facebook do, which is you search for a new story and they tell you where to r…”
Apr 16, 2023 neutral
Evans: Meta spends billions inventing tech, unlike Apple's original off-the-shelf iPhone
“Meta is spending tens of billions of dollars every year on all of that Moore's law, because where Apple could basically sit on top of an awful lot of technology that already existed, like they didn't need to create ARM from scratch. They didn't need to invent …”
Apr 24, 2023 neutral
Apr 24, 2023 neutral
Evans: ChatGPT breaks consumer internet economics with compute costs per query
“The idea that it actually costs money to press enter on a consumer internet site, like posting a pic, you're actually like a Facebook if it'd cost money to do a post. And you had to wait 30 seconds for it to appear. Well, that's kind of what ChatGPT is now. Li…”
Apr 24, 2023 negative
Evans: Publisher link tax demands against Google and Facebook are flawed
“And this is, in many ways, just a kind of, it's one of those arguments that just sort of disintegrates as soon as you poke at it, in any way at all, because they don't argue with, they don't, they think they're the only people that should get paid, not anyone …”
Jun 5, 2023 bearish
Evans: Developers will have little reason to build for Meta Quest
“I feel very sorry for Meta because they spent, you know, however many tens of billions of dollars on their product that, you know, no one's really, only a couple of million people are really using and doesn't have traction. And after this, why on earth would y…”
Jun 18, 2023 neutral
Benedict Evans: Spatial computing turns the metaverse into a mere app icon
“With a feature phone, internet was one icon on your telephone. Whereas on a smartphone, the telephone is one icon on your computer. So kind of whole thing gets kind of pulled inside out. And that's sort of the AR VR thesis here that Apple has is no metaverse i…”
Jun 18, 2023 positive
Benedict Evans: Apple's laptop-grade silicon gives Vision Pro an architectural advantage
“Apple is using a high-end laptop SAC in this thing because they have their own, which has massively better performance per watt than anything from Intel. Guess what Meta has to use? They have to use a smartphone chip from Volcom.”
Jun 18, 2023 bearish
Benedict Evans: Meta Quest has only single-digit millions of regular users
“So Meta sold maybe twenty million. That you have survey data that says that maybe 10 or 20% of people are actually using them regularly, which is not a great number. So there's like single digit numbers of millions of people using this thing.”
Jun 18, 2023 neutral
Benedict Evans: Meta has spent at least $35 billion on Reality Labs
“Meta has spent, I think, at least thirty five billion dollars on this stuff. Because they spent like over thirty billion dollars on operating losses for the Reality Labs group, offset a bit by revenue from selling hardware and games. And they bought Oculus, an…”
Jun 18, 2023 negative
Benedict Evans: Meta has spent up to $20,000 per active Quest user
“Yes, I was doing some back of the envelope math earlier, and like, if Meta, you know, like, depending on quite how much they've spent, quite many active users, Meta would spend somewhere between 10 and 20,000 dollars for each active user that they have on this…”
Jul 21, 2023 bearish
News on social platforms creates aggravation without driving revenue or usage
“Speaking from a business perspective, news is a lot more trouble than it's worth. It's not actually particularly good for business because it's a huge amount of aggravation and toxicity and anger and problem. And it doesn't actually drive a lot of, it certainl…”
Jul 21, 2023 negative
App Store privacy labels are a self-inflicted wound for Apple
“And so it's weird because the weird thing about this is this is actually hurting Apple. Clearly it's the problem with Meta and Twitter and anybody else with an app on the store, but it's also hurting Apple because Apple is telling people that there's no privac…”
Jul 21, 2023 positive
Jul 21, 2023 negative
Jul 21, 2023 neutral
Evans: Meta is not designing Threads for Twitter power users
“And the same thing here, Meta is not building for people who've got 35 alphabetized lists. Meta is not building for people who use RayX to do searches on Twitter. Meta is not building for people who follow 20,000 people and use TweetDeck. It's not building for…”
Oct 29, 2023 neutral
Evans: Creator reach declines due to user competition, not algorithm malice
“The other half of it is the reason that you're downranked in the newsfeed is because people don't care, A, people don't care about you that much, B, they followed 50 of your competitors, and B, they have a hundred friends. And there's no solution to that.”
Feb 8, 2024 neutral
Feb 8, 2024 positive
Feb 16, 2024
Mar 3, 2024 neutral
Mar 3, 2024 negative
Evans: Social platforms previously blocked COVID lab leak and mask efficacy posts
“I mean, the kind of the case study here is when social networks decided to block anybody Suggesting that masks weren't very useful during COVID or block anybody suggesting that maybe COVID had leaked from a Chinese biology research lab. And I think now, I don'…”
Mar 3, 2024
Evans: AI prompt moderation will repeat social media governance battles
“You re-run all of the arguments we had around content moderation and social media of what should people be allowed to say. You either say more or less anything, which is Elon Musk's idea, or you end up with a long list of criteria, which is where Facebook has …”
Mar 13, 2024
Evans: EU and UK moderation laws force global compliance everywhere
“The UK and the EU now have laws requiring, that basically require you to have what most people would consider like best practice content moderation, which is basically you've got to do what Facebook is kind of doing anyway. And applying it to country companies…”
Mar 13, 2024 positive
Mar 13, 2024 neutral
Brown: TikTok Gives Americans a Taste of Foreign Tech Dominance
“Saying that, like, basically Americans are experiencing what the rest of Europe has experienced over the last 10 years of, yeah, your citizens are loving a piece, a social media app that wasn't designed by Americans for Americans with Americans in mind.
yeah,…”
Mar 13, 2024 neutral
Apr 5, 2025 neutral
Aug 21, 2025 negative
Evans: Meta AI in Instagram search failed due to mismatched user intent
“Meta tried to put their app as like a blue circle, put the, but the AI thing is a blue circle inside all their apps and it just didn't work. No one knew what it was. And it was like, they're floating in the search window, but that's not why you use search and …”
Aug 21, 2025 bearish
Evans: Lack of network effects makes ChatGPT's early lead fragile
“Given that there's no network effects, or don't, or not yet any network effects in LLMs, that feels very fragile. Like, you know, if you remember, you know, I cannot, you know, remember, like, everyone used Yahoo, and then everyone switched to Google, because …”
Nov 16, 2025 neutral
Evans: Big Tech funds AI capex out of cash flow, unlike OpenAI
“Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are funding it out of cash flow, Meta less so than the others, whereas OpenAI has to do these innovative funding structures because it has no cash flow, and Oracle is basically going to borrow a hundred percent of revenue to…”
Feb 23, 2026 neutral
Evans: Big Four tech capex will jump from $400B to $650B
“The big four companies, platform companies, spent four hundred billion dollars on capex last year. This year, they've said they'll spend 650, more or less. Microsoft hasn't been given full year guidance. But Meta and Google and Amazon have more or less doubled…”
Jul 15, 2026 positive
Evans: Anthropic Leads AI Frontier, OpenAI and Gemini Trail by 5%
“Because right now we've got, you know, Anthropics ahead at the moment. We have OpenAI and Gemini five percent behind, like not far behind. Grok just, SpaceX Grok Nazi model just came out with like a model that's in like the top At the top of some of the benchm…”