For the first time in its history, Facebook is in decline. Has the tech giant begun to crumble? | John Naughton

Given that Facebook has hitherto been a licence to print money, so much so that at one stage (in 2019), when it was fined $5bn by the Federal Trade Commission, its shares actually went up as Wall Street registered that the ostensibly massive fine was actually the equivalent of a fleabite on an elephant.

The trick was to attract users quickly (by not charging for services) and to get to the point where user numbers are big enough to make it very difficult to break into the market. Facebook reached that point long ago and if you want a measure of its power at the moment, try working out what the square of 2.91bn is.