Jeff Horwitz, the Reuters technology reporter whose 2021 Wall Street Journal investigation into Facebook helped inspire The Social Reckoning, told the BBC’s The Global Story on September 30 that a decade of misinformation, teen-safety scandals and cheap AI video has not cost Meta its users or its ad business.
Distrust never became a business problem
Horwitz told the BBC that Meta has, “when push comes to shove consistently chosen growth” over fixes to its apps. An internal marketing memo, he said, recorded that people “absolutely thought the worst of Meta” while product usage stayed flat. The company’s reading: this was not a business problem.
For media buyers, that distinction matters. Ad demand follows behavior, not sentiment. Users can distrust a platform and keep scrolling, and advertisers keep paying to reach them.
The Q2 numbers prove it
Meta’s ad revenue rose 27% to $59.36 billion in Q2 2026. Impressions grew 14%, and the average price per ad rose 12%. The automated Advantage+ suite passed an annual revenue run rate above $75 billion, and more than 9 million small businesses used at least one AI ad creative tool.
Meta’s audience metrics point the same direction. Family daily active people across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp averaged 3.60 billion in June 2026, up 3% year over year. Instagram passed 2 billion daily users and Threads hit 500 million monthly users.
Horwitz’s larger argument is structural. Meta’s integrity teams tested healthier-discussion features, but the fixes generally moved products off what he called “the growth optimal path.” Scams show how that logic reaches the ad ledger: Reuters previously reported Meta projected roughly 10% of 2024 revenue, about $16 billion, from ads for scams and banned goods.
Where rules are changing
The teen-safety settlement introduces real constraints for marketers with teen-heavy offers. In the United States settling states, Meta must now default teen accounts to a two-hour daily cap, disable notifications from 10pm to 7am and apply school mode from 8am to 3pm on weekdays. Like counts are hidden from teens by default, cosmetic-procedure filters are disabled, and data from under-13s cannot be used in ad targeting.
Age assurance is the catch: the limit applies only where Meta can correctly identify who is a teen, and accounts that remain unassessed after 14 days are treated as teens regardless of stated age.
What to do
- Watch reach, CPM and conversion before cutting budgets.
- Test Advantage+ and AI creative tools for lower-cost scale.
- Re-audit teen targeting as the two-hour cap and age rules take effect.
Don’t wait for scandal pricing. Meta’s history shows public outrage doesn’t automatically create cheap inventory, because usage holds. Track reach, CPM and conversion data before reacting to headlines.
The deeper insight is that Meta’s ad engine is built for distribution, not reputation. When outrage flares, the system keeps matching users to advertisers because usage does not drop. That is why CPMs keep rising even when the comments section is hostile.
Meta’s next chapter is AI, with capital expenditure reaching $31.08 billion in Q2 and full-year guidance of $130 billion to $145 billion. The ad machine funding it keeps growing despite everything thrown at it.
Source: PPC Land
