American technology company run by Mark Zuckerberg. In its annual reports Meta warns that if Zuckerberg were out of action "there could be a material adverse impact on our operations", and has for the past two years listed his potentially incapacitating pursuits: "combat sports, extreme sports and recreational aviation". The Federal Trade Commission is pursuing a case accusing Meta of maintaining an illegal monopoly through its purchase of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Hearings began on April 14th 2025. Meta is said to have sought Donald Trump's help in reaching a settlement with the FTC, with little success.
After Trump's re-election Zuckerberg gushed that it was nice to have an administration that was "proud" of America's tech champions. During the campaign Trump had referred to Meta as an "enemy of the people". Zuckerberg attended Trump's inauguration, contributed to the president's ballroom fund and purchased a property in Washington. Meta touts the use of its technology by American armed forces, and Zuckerberg appointed Trump's former deputy national security adviser as his vice-chair. Meta spent $65m on lobbying over state-level artificial-intelligence laws.
Chinese e-commerce firms such as Shein and Temu accounted for about a tenth of Meta's advertising revenue in 2023. The removal of the de minimis exemption threatens this business.
In April 2025 the EU fined Meta and Apple a combined total of around $796m for breaching its Digital Markets Act. In its first DMA-mandated compliance report, Meta said more than 11,000 employees had devoted more than 590,000 hours of engineering and technical work over two years to comply.
In 2023, when Canada passed a law requiring internet platforms to pay news outlets for links in their search results or social-media feeds, Meta blocked links to news sites on Canadian users' Facebook and Instagram accounts rather than pay up. News makes up just 3% of the Facebook feed globally.
Meta's employee count peaked at 86,000 in 2022. By the end of 2024 it had shed 12,000 of those, and each remaining employee generated $2.2m in revenue, up from $1.4m three years earlier. In January 2025 Mark Zuckerberg vowed to rank employees and remove the worst-performing 5%.
Only one in 20 Facebook users is under 18, according to estimates by eMarketer. Since 2023 a dispute with regulators has prevented Meta from showing ads to under-18s in the EU, its second-largest market, but there has been no visible impact on its bottom line. Meta has deployed artificial intelligence to identify users who are younger than they claim to be, and uses age-estimation technology from Yoti, a firm whose AI can guess the age of a white teenage boy to within less than ten months but is typically out by a year and a half for a dark-skinned girl.
Advertising accounts for virtually all of Meta's revenue, which reached $200bn in 2025. Google, Meta, ByteDance and Amazon—the four largest sellers of ads—accounted for more than half the global advertising market in 2024, up from just over a third in 2019. Meta's AI-powered Advantage+ system claims to increase brands' return on ad spending by 22%. See digital advertising.
Zuckerberg has rebranded Meta's AI work as "superintelligence labs" and is poaching researchers with nine-figure salaries. Meta is building a data centre the size of Manhattan, dubbed Hyperion, which will consume the same amount of energy in a year as New Zealand. Zuckerberg also unveiled Project Prometheus, a cluster of data centres in Louisiana covering an area almost the size of Manhattan, with some power coming from gas extracted at the site. Meta sold $30bn of bonds to pay for its data-centre investments, the biggest such deal of the year. Another $27bn of largely debt-funded investment tied to its new data centre in Louisiana will sit off its balance-sheet.
In June 2025 Meta paid $14.3bn for a 49% stake in Scale AI, a data-labelling firm, in what may be the world's most expensive acquihire. Alexandr Wang, Scale AI's 28-year-old founder, was named head of a new "superintelligence" unit focused on developing AI products. Meta was also planning to offer more than $1bn combined to hire Nat Friedman, former boss of GitHub, and Daniel Gross, a venture capitalist and co-founder of Safe Superintelligence. Sam Altman of OpenAI said Meta was offering signing bonuses of $100m to poach his staff. Meta's market value stood at $1.7trn in mid-2025.
In 2022 Meta released an open-licence AI translation model covering 200 languages, with a focus on those in Africa and Asia. Christian missions organisations adapted the model for Bible translation, putting a secular tool to sacred work.
Meta has been developing AI-powered smart glasses, shifting resources away from virtual-reality headsets to speed the effort. Zuckerberg has said he reckons people who adopt smart glasses will not throw away their smartphones but simply stare at them less. With built-in cameras, lenses that can display WhatsApp messages and speakers that direct sound straight to the ear, the devices make it easier for users to share on social media, generating more ad revenue. HSBC estimates there are 15m users of smart glasses worldwide.
Just after Christmas 2025 Meta announced it would pay more than $2bn to acquire Manus, a Chinese AI lab that had relocated to Singapore. On April 27th 2026 the Chinese government blocked the acquisition; Manus's co-founders have been barred from leaving China since March.
To free up cash for data centres, Meta recently said it would lay off 10% of its workforce.
Meta's Llama is one of the most prominent open-source AI models. According to a survey by Menlo Ventures, Chinese models account for around 10% of open-model usage among American enterprises; most rely instead on models from Meta or Mistral. Critics in the AI-safety community note that open-source models allow anyone who downloads them to modify and remove built-in moderation, making misuse harder to prevent. Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, dismisses fears of AI catastrophe: "Our relationship with future AI systems, including superintelligence, is that we're going to be their boss."
Meta signed a 20-year deal in June 2025 to fund a life extension of the Clinton Power Station in Illinois, run by Constellation Energy, in return for the carbon credits that come with nuclear power generation. The plant had been made unprofitable by cheap shale gas and was due to be retired in 2027.
On March 25th 2026 a jury in California ordered Meta and Google to pay $6m in damages to a plaintiff known as Kaley, a 20-year-old who started using social media aged six and became addicted. Rather than holding the companies responsible for harmful content (which Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would have shielded), her lawyers attacked the way the platforms are designed—features such as auto-playing videos, personalised recommendations and infinite feeds. The novel legal argument could influence thousands of similar lawsuits filed against Meta, Google and other social-media firms. Some lawyers have compared the claims to the cases brought against tobacco companies. Both companies said they would appeal. It was the first time that Mark Zuckerberg appeared before a jury.
Internal documents produced in KGM v Meta Platforms revealed that in 2016, after losing ground to TikTok and Snapchat, Meta executives set the "overall company goal" as "total teen time spent". A 2019 internal slide deck marked "Confidential" concluded that "Teens can't switch off from Instagram even if they want to." Internal research found that 12-year-olds were three times as likely as 32-year-olds to stay on Facebook long-term, despite the platform nominally requiring users to be at least 13. One internal memo concluded that Facebook "should consider investing more heavily in bringing in larger volumes of tweens." The company's own research documented an "addict's narrative": teens spending too much time on a compulsive activity they knew was negative but felt powerless to resist. One employee message read: "Oh my gosh y'all, [Instagram] is a drug. We're basically pushers."
Nick Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister, served as vice-president and then president of global affairs at Meta from 2018 to 2025.
Meta built probably the world's largest network of fact-checkers for its social networks. In January 2025 it announced it would start to replace professional fact-checkers with volunteers. The five most-followed news organisations on Facebook are all Chinese state media outlets, despite Facebook being banned in China itself; CGTN leads with 125m followers.
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.