Is Meta dying?

An interview pegged to The Social Reckoning, the film drawn from the Facebook Files, with the reporter behind them. Jeff Horwitz, now at Reuters, does not think Meta is dying. His account is of a company that has repeatedly been shown the cost of its growth and has kept growing.

He dates the turn to the years before the 2012 IPO, when Facebook went from pages you maintained and a chronological list of updates to a feed ranked by what would keep you there. That made virality, and it rewarded whatever people engaged with, cat videos and conspiracies alike. After 2016 the company set up integrity teams to see whether the product could be made healthier. Horwitz says the fixes they found for polarisation, predation and scams nearly always meant giving up growth, and that the company chose growth each time; he describes tens of thousands of leaked screenshots that show it. One internal marketing memo found that people thought the worst of Meta and used it no less. That, he says, is when the reputation stopped being treated as a business problem.

On the lawsuits, the states’ settlement in August brought money and rules: no late-night or school-hours notifications for teens, and a two-hour daily cap. He doubts the cap, since it depends on Meta knowing which accounts are teenagers’. Internal documents, he says, showed parental controls were popular in principle and barely used.

What next? Zuckerberg has been looking past social media for years: crypto, then the metaverse, now large language models. Horwitz says Meta is not leading there but has the cash and the user data to matter, and that it is approaching AI the same way. His Reuters reporting found chatbot guidelines that allowed “romantic or sensual” conversations with children. Meta told the BBC those examples were erroneous and have been removed.

A few figures in the episode are loose. The settlement is worth up to $17.1 billion: Meta pays $12.19 billion over ten years, and the larger number applies only if TikTok, YouTube and Snap agree to similar terms. Cambridge Analytica became a scandal in March 2018, not 2016. The metaverse was cut back, not shut: Reality Labs lost 10% of its staff in January and is still running, with losses of $83.6 billion since 2020 and another $8.6 billion in the first half of 2026. The layoffs Horwitz mentions were a plan to cut some teams by up to 60%; one wave was cancelled and a 10% cut went ahead. Meta’s daily users did dip in early 2026, then recovered by June.