Despite being charged with a $5 billion fine, Facebook has reported better than expected second-quarter results for 2019.
The social media giant has announced its Q2 results for the year with a revenue of $16.9 billion. The platform now has over 2.7 billion monthly active users on its family of apps (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger) and 1.59 billion people using Facebook each day.
As the graph below shows, the company saw the most growth in Asian-Pacific regions and “Rest of the world” regions, whereas the US and Europe only showed flat growth.
It is pretty clear now that the FTC’s fine on Facebook was a mere slap to the wrist for the company. A settlement of $5 billion against revenues of $16.9 billion and that too for a single quarter shows the scale of Facebook.
Likewise, SEC’s $100 million fine regarding “misleading disclosures” that the company made around data risk just sounds like a joke at this point.
It is evident that Facebook’s growth is unstoppable and these fines are barely doing anything. The weight of these fines might not be much, but FTC’s new regulations on the company are at least forcing an uplift.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that they will be implementing a new privacy committee that will be reviewing every new product and service that the company develops, and will be keeping an eye on the company’s matters in general.
Going forward, Zuckerberg has promised in his official statement that their top priority is,
…making progress on the major social issues facing the internet, including privacy, and also elections, harmful content, data portability, and more. In all these areas, I’ve advocated the internet would benefit from governments setting clearer rules.
