Facebook posted $9.2 billion in net profit in the third quarter, 17% more than a year ago, in rare good news for the social media giant caught in one of its worst reputation scandals.

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The platform has been accused by a whistleblower, NGOs and many authorities of favoring profits at the expense of the safety and health of users for years. From July to September, Facebook achieved a turnover of 29 billion dollars, slightly below the expectations of investors, who expected 500 million more. Its title still took nearly 4% during electronic trading after the stock market.

"We have made good progress this quarter and our community continues to grow," said Mark Zuckerberg, the Californian group's boss, soberly, quoted in the results press release published on Monday. Its two networks (with Instagram) and messengers (WhatsApp and Messenger) are now visited by 2.8 billion people every day (11% more than a year ago) and by 3.58 billion users in least once a month (+12%). What reassure Wall Street, which looks above all if the platforms continue to attract the public, and therefore the advertisers. Facebook holds 23.7% of the global digital advertising market in 2021, according to the firm eMarketer, just behind its neighbor Google, number one in the sector with 28.6% of the share of the cake.

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Potential negative impact

Analysts were also watching for a potential negative impact from the latest iPhone operating system update, which gives users more control over their private data and makes it harder for social networks to measure efficiency. Snap, Snapchat's parent company, posted disappointing results last week because of the change, which sent its stock plummeting and Facebook's down as well. But for now, "Facebook's earnings look as good as expected," responded Debra Aho Williamson of eMarketer. The analyst points out that the group is working on new measurement techniques and new advertising formats to circumvent the problem: “If the tests are conclusive, we can expect annual advertising expenditure at the same level as at present”. She nevertheless noted that Facebook was facing a "deluge of negative press", without financial consequences for the moment.

For more than a month, American newspapers have been reporting articles based on the "Facebook papers", thousands of internal documents submitted to the SEC, the stock market authority, by Frances Haugen, a whistleblower and former engineer of the group Californian. In common thread of the controversies: the social network giant was aware of the problems - toxic content on Instagram for teenagers, disinformation on Facebook which harms democracy, etc. - but chose, in part, to ignore them, for the sake of preserving its profits.

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