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 19 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
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…”
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”
Evans: Telco stocks were flat for 20 years while apps captured value
“Giant industry, trillion dollars of revenue, two hundred billion dollars a year of CapEx stocks have gone nowhere in 20 years, and all the value is built by other people.”
Evans: Temu and Shein Accounted for $4 Billion of Meta's Revenue
“10% of revenue, five percent of revenue growth. And so that's about four billion dollars, and so apparently half of that was Temu, and well, presumably quite a lot of the rest was Shein.”
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'…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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 …”
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.”
Evans: FTC seeks contradictory consent decrees on Facebook data APIs
“Today's FTC is demanding a consent decree that says Facebook has to open up Data APIs. And two years ago, they got another consent decree that said Facebook has to close down its data APIs.”
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…”
Brown: TikTok Has Stricter Political Ad Rules Than Meta
“And they also have the strictest policy when it comes to political advertising, much more stricter than Meta”
Evans: News is a low single-digit share of social platform posts
“And for them, news is a very small and peripheral thing.
You know, it's whatever it is.
It's low single digit shares, even all the posts that have links, nevermind all the posts that don't have links.”
Evans: 20M VR headsets sold, only 5M-10M active users
“There's like 5,000,010 million people actually using a device, so it's twenty million people, they've sold twenty million headsets, there's five or ten million people using them.”
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 …”
Evans: Meta's 13 million VR headsets yield only 5 million active users
“I think Facebook's probably sold 12, thirteen million of them. There's maybe five million people actually using them.”