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 265 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: Vast majority of platform moderation decisions are universally agreed upon
“The vast majority of the decisions are not the lab leak theory from China or Hunter Biden's laptop. They're not things where people disagree. They are, you know, things where literally everybody who thinks content moderation is bad would look at that and go, o…”
Evans: AI Model Inference Alone Generates 40% to 50% Gross Margins
“And meanwhile, we sort of know that you have positive gross margins on inference alone of sort of 40, 50%, but you've got the cost of building the next model, and you don't know where the cost The cost will move, or the cost of the next model will move, and yo…”
Evans: DeepSeek Proves Anyone With Two Billion Can Build Foundation Models
“Like anyone who's got a couple of billion dollars can make a foundation model which is what DeepSeq showed us as well.”
Google paid $25 billion last year in device revenue share
“Google is paying a revenue share of 25 to 35% of the revenue they get from each search back to the device, and that was twenty-five billion dollars last year.”
The US court cannot compel Apple to add Safari choice screens
“The court can't make Apple put a choice screen in Safari. Like, Apple isn't in court. Like, they haven't been convicted of anything.”
Evans: Google Gemini generated racially diverse depictions of Nazi stormtroopers
“And so it turned out that if you typed in, give me pictures of Nazi stormtroopers, you got A white person in Nazi uniform, and a black person, and a Chinese person, and an Asian woman, and so on.”
Goldberg: Cost per transistor is increasing in many cases
“The cost per transistor is actually going up in a lot of cases”
Evans: MrBeast viewing time rivals a top 10 to 15 Netflix show
“Depending on whether you think he gets like one minute Per view, or six or seven minutes per view, it looks like Mr. Beast in total would sort of count as like a top 10 to top 15 Netflix show on a weekly, rolling weekly basis, and sometimes more than that.”
Evans: Australian court ruled Google is not a publisher in defamation suit
“There was a fascinating court case a couple of weeks ago in which some, someone, a newspaper would describe somebody as a gangster, and the newspaper story is in Google, and the person accused of being a gangster sued Google for defamation, and the court said,…”
Evans: Laws of physics prevent mesh networks from replacing cellular
“You can't replace, laws of physics prevent mesh networks from replacing cellular.”
Evans: Apple's SKAdNetwork limits conversion attribution data compared to IDFA
“They're going to turn it off and replace it with something called SK Ad Network, which will really just tell you there was an install, but not tell you what or how much it resulted in, which is like massively less useful.”
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: EU communication privacy law inadvertently banned child abuse scanning
“So late, late in December, the EU had passed a law on privacy of communications platforms, which basically said you're not allowed to look at what people are saying to each other. And suddenly realized, just as this was about to go into effect in mid-December,…”
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: Meta AI consumer usage rivals Gemini; Claude has zero adoption
“For consumers, Meta AI has got not actually very dissimilar usage to Gemini, and Claude is nowhere.”
Evans: Top four cloud platforms will spend over $200B on data centers this year
“And we will build the five, four platform companies, four big cloud companies will spend something over two hundred billion dollars this year, which is up 80 or ninety billion dollars from last year on building data center.”
Microsoft invested $100 billion in Bing over 20 years for 5-10% share
“Bing has invested about a hundred billion dollars over the last 20 years, and they've got 10%, five to 10% share of US search.”
70% of US search happens on Google default placements
“About 70% of search in the US happens on a device where Google's made it the default.”
Evans: Deloitte survey shows one-third believe generative AI is always accurate
“They asked about hallucinations, and they said, do you believe that generative AI always produces accurate answers? And the question is still, like, a third of people say yes, even if they've tried it.”
Evans: Hong Kong security law technically applies to US firms in America
“The Hong Kong national security law, technically applies to American companies in America. So if you work for a company that happens to be covered by that law and you set foot in Hong Kong, then they can arrest you, even if the company isn't in Hong Kong.”
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: US De Minimis Rule Gives Temu a Massive Tax Advantage
“There is a rule in the US that for orders of a value of less than 800 dollars, there's no import taxes or different, much less, or different import taxes. And so if you were running a store in the U.S. And shipping a shipping container full of garments to Amer…”
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'…”
Evans: Twitter cut 80% of staff and withheld contractual severance
“And meanwhile, Twitter fired 80% of the staff and an awful lot of them have said it's failing to pay them their contractual severance payments.”
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…”
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.”
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: Google pays Apple nearly $20B for default iPhone search
“Google pays, Apple pays, Apple probably close to twenty billion dollars to be the default search engine on the iPhone.”
Evans: 30% to 40% of top Amazon sellers are Chinese companies
“Something like 30 or 40% of the top Amazon marketplace sellers are actually Chinese companies.”
Evans: YouTube creator payouts rival major TV studio programming budgets
“And then of course they pay out 45% of the ad revenue to the creators, which makes, puts their budget somewhere sort of Makes them sort of top three, top four. If you count that as programming budget, comparable to the US media companies, that would put them s…”
Evans: One Medical holds no meaningful market power in US healthcare
“There's no possible basis on which you can say One Medical has any kind of meaningful market power in the US healthcare industry.”
Evans: Shein uses browsing traffic to trigger 200-unit manufacturing batches
“You know, there's all sorts of different narratives about this, but you know, at a very, at a minimum, they're ordering in very short, small numbers. They may not even have actually ordered that product before they list it on the site. They're making 200 of th…”
Evans: Shein surpassed Zara and H&M combined in US sales
“No, Ernest, which is this company that does credit card, aggregates credit card bills, sort of said it's now the same size as Zara and H&M, and now, at the end of last year, it's bigger than Zara and H&M combined in US purchasing”
Evans: Shein raised at a $100B valuation, surpassing Zara and H&M combined
“And Sheehan raised this week at a hundred billion dollars, which Company we talked about before and is now bigger than Zara and H&M combined globally.”
Evans: TSMC manufactures roughly 75% of current-generation semiconductor chips
“TSMC Really in the last five years moved from being one of many players in chips to dominating cutting into chip. So, you know, current generation chips are, I forget the number, three quarters TSMC.”
Evans: China regulates algorithmic feeds while US and EU lag far behind
“So like, you know, very, very detailed thing on how algorithmic content moderation should work, and how algorithmic content feeds should work, which the EU and the US have not anywhere close to having. Like, now here's a law on how the news feed should work.”
Evans: 0.5% of iPhone users generate half of App Store spending
“Second observation is we know from the disclosures in the Epic trial that about 80% so Apple did fifteen billion dollars. Apple gives a number. They did fifteen billion dollars in App Store commission. 65, sixty-five billion dollars, I think, of total money sp…”
Evans: 0.5% of App Store Accounts Generated 54% of Billings in 2016
“Not .5% of accounts spent over 450 dollars in the quarter. Not sure if this is quarter or month, I have to go and check. Same point, really. And those users were 54% of total App Store billings.”
Li: Chinese platform fines targeted exclusive vendor lock-in agreements
“So if you're a supplier to Alibaba, you can't go on Pinduoduo or JD. They would sometimes make you sign an inclusive, exclusive agreement with them, which would be very, you know, anti-competitive in most parts of the world. But they've managed to sort of have…”
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: US advertising as a share of GDP dropped 33% since 2000
“The chart that I've done of long-term US advertising since 1950, I did as a share of GDP, mainly as a way to adjust for inflation. But the interesting thing that it shows, it suggests, is that US advertising as a share of GDP has gone down by about a third sin…”
Evans: US text bot hype was fueled by false WeChat narratives
“And there was a moment three and four years ago when everyone in America was very excited about bots, text bots, and there was this whole narrative, well, that's how WeChat works, and WeChat's got hundreds of millions of users, so this must be a thing. It turn…”
Evans: Ben Thompson is wrong, email open rates depend on algorithms
“I love Ben Thompson, but he keeps saying there's no algorithm in email, like, Ben, have you looked at your open rates? Because I've looked at mine, and yeah, there is a fucking algorithm.”
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: Covid pandemic compressed five years of e-commerce growth into two quarters
“We've had, you know, three, four, five years worth of growth happen in like two quarters.”
Cowan-Brown: There is no global definition of hate speech
“I mean, when I used to work at nation builder, we had also such a hard time of defining. And again, it's a little bit different there because it's not a platform that amplifies I'll come back to that in a second, but it's not a platform. You don't go there to …”