This notification was on my iPad:

A HUNDRED messages? Okay, maybe something blew up. I’ve not been looking at Facebook for a while, but I’ve been reluctant to delete my account entirely because it’s the only way I keep in touch with a whole bunch of people. Maybe something happened?

I open the app, and I’m greeted with this:

Yeah, no notifications whatsoever inside the app.

Facebook is now actively lying to get its Daily Active Users count up. Keep this sort of thing in mind when they quote such-and-such a number of users.

To Facebook, user engagement stats are life itself. If they ever start to slide seriously, their business is toast. Remember in 2016, when Facebook was sued over inflated video ad metrics? Basically, if you scrolled past a video ad in your feed, that still counted as a “view”, resulting in viewer counts that were inflated by 80%.

Earlier this year, Facebook had its first loss in daily active users in the US and Canada. They are still growing elsewhere, but not without consequences, as the New York Times reports in a hard-hitting piece entitled Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match.

At this point, I imagine anyone still working for Facebook is not nearly as forward with that fact at dinner parties or in bars, instead offering the sort of generic “yeah, I work in IT” non-answer that back-office staff at porn sites are used to giving.