Category: Blog

The number of people using Facebook daily grew to an average of two billion in December – about a quarter of the world’s population.

The bigger-than-expected growth helped drive new optimism about the company, which has been under pressure as its costs rise and advertising sales slump.

Shares in parent company Meta surged more than 15% in after-hours trade as boss Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 the “year of efficiency”.

He said he was focused on cost cuts.

“We’re in a different environment now,” he said, pointing to the firm’s revenue, which declined in 2022 for the first time in its history after years of double-digit growth. 

“We don’t anticipate that that’s going to continue, but I also don’t think it’s going to go back to the way it was before.”

Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, announced a major restructuring last year, including reducing office space and cutting 11,000 jobs or about 13% of staff.

The firm said those moves cost it $4.6bn last year – hitting its profits, which were almost cut in half. It still brought it in $23.2bn in profit for the year.

“2022 was a challenging year but I think we ended it having made good progress,” Mr Zuckerberg said. 

In the three months to December, the firm said revenue was $32.2bn, down 4% year-on-year. 

But that was better than many analysts had expected. 

Meta alarmed investors last year when it posted the first-ever decline in daily Facebook users in its history and signaled it was focusing investments on virtual reality, known as the metaverse. 

But in December, the number of users on the site daily was up 4% from a year earlier, adding users even in Europe and the US, and Canada. 

Meta said the number of people active across all of its apps each day was up 5% year-on-year. 

Mr Zuckerberg said the company was making progress with its video product – Reels – which it has been focused on as it faces off with rivals such as TikTok, which have gained traction, especially among younger users. 

Mr Zuckerberg said those efforts were starting to pay off, and ad dollars were starting to follow users to the videos.

Investors seized on the company’s forecast of lower costs and stronger sales than expected in the months ahead, helping send shares higher. 

The company also said it would spend an extra $40bn to buy back shares, which dropped sharply last year amid investor doubts about the direction of the company.

Three new exhibitions explore how the femme fatale in art reflects evolving anxieties writes Cath Pound.

 The figure of the femme fatale is one of the defining literary and artistic motifs of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Artists were drawn to historical archetypes of female seduction such as Cleopatra or Lucrezia Borgia, characters from Old Testament stories including Salome, Judith, and Delilah, or mythical figures such as Circe, Helen of Troy, and Medea. Others were conjured from their male author’s imagination – Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, Émile Zola’s Nana, and Frank Wedekind’s Lulu being some of the most notable.

Her emergence is frequently seen as a response to anxieties arising from profound social change as women pushed for greater economic, political, and educational rights, challenging the established patriarchal order. Middle-class women who sought education were, according to the British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, likely to damage their reproductive organs, turning them into monstrosities who threatened the survival of the human race. Fear of contagious diseases such as syphilis was another factor, with working-class prostitutes being seen as contemporary femmes fatales who could lure their clients to their doom.

The 19th-Century image of the femme fatale was largely shaped by the Pre-Raphaelites in images such as Edward Burne Jones’ The Beguiling of Merlin (1872-77) or Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1866-68). The latter sees the disobedient first wife of Adam transformed into a vain bohemian beauty admiring her luscious locks in a hand mirror.

Were they responding to a trend or instrumental in shaping the narrative? “I think both,” says Carol Jacobi, curator of Tate Britain’s forthcoming exhibition The Rossettis. “They were responding to social trends, both the reactionary ones and the whole idea of the ‘fallen woman’, and also the women in their circle who were the New Women. At the same time, I think Rossetti creates a new visual language for the femme fatale that brings it to the mainstream and was picked up by a lot of other artists.”

World records come as no surprise to some of athletics’ biggest names – and one of Usain Bolt’s long-standing marks is under threat as a World Championships year gets underway.

American star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone believes “anything is possible” following her record-breaking 400m hurdles triumph to win world gold in Eugene last year.

The 23-year-old will be joined by compatriot Noah Lyles, world 200m champion, in Boston for the second World Athletics Indoor Tour event of the season on Saturday, where both athletes will compete for over 60m.

“It wasn’t a huge surprise,” said McLaughlin-Levrone on her record run.

“That was our goal all along. But it was a sigh of relief being able to accomplish it,” added the Olympic champion, speaking to BBC World Service.

Unbeaten over 200m in 2022, Lyles defended his 200m title in emphatic fashion as he broke Michael Johnson’s 26-year-old national record to become the third-fastest man over the distance in history.

And he believes beating Jamaican sprinting legend Bolt’s world record “will not be that hard”.

McLaughlin-Levrone, named World Athlete of the Year for 2022 alongside pole vaulter Armand Duplantis, produced her latest astonishing run as she took almost three-quarters of a second off her own 400m hurdles record to take world gold last year.

Improving her best time to 50.68 seconds in Eugene, she has now run five of the six fastest times in history.

That time over the hurdles would have placed her seventh in the final of the 400m flat.

The three-time world gold medallist’s stunning performances have led many to wonder when she might switch her attention to that event, in which Marita Koch’s record of 47.6 seconds has stood for 37 years.

“There’s room in both to accomplish great things and continue pushing my times,” said McLaughlin-Levrone, who will come up against world 200m champion Shericka Jackson on Saturday.

“I haven’t ran the 400 competitively in a few years. Once we decide what is best for 2023, that’s what we’ll do.

A young man stands grinning in Beijing’s Forbidden City. It’s the dead of winter, and one of his hands is buried deep into the pockets of his long overcoat to protect it from the chill. The other grasps the unmistakable contours of a glass Coca-Cola bottle.

Today, Coke is the world’s most famous soft drink and can be found just about anywhere. But back in 1981, when the image was shot by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Liu Heung Shing, it was only just getting into the hands of ordinary Chinese people.

Liu, who was in his late 20s when he began working for Time magazine in Beijing, felt the country was on the cusp of a great cultural shift following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976.

“The changes (at first) were subtle, and unless you lived there, you wouldn’t have noticed,” he recalled during an interview at his home in Hong Kong.

He had earlier photographed people grieving for Mao along the banks of the Pearl River in Guangzhou. It was here that he was struck by how differently people carried themselves compared to what he had seen in late-1950s China, where he grew up during the disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign — a series of failed industrialization policies — before moving back to Hong Kong as a child.

Under Mao, the country went on to suffer from widespread famine and poverty, and the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution. But in the aftermath of the Chinese leader’s death, Liu said, “suddenly, people’s steps looked a little bit lighter, they dropped their shoulders and their faces looked more relaxed.”

It would prove to be a relatively liberal period in Chinese history — politically, economically, and in terms of everyday life, which Liu captured in candid shots. One photo from the time showed a plastic surgeon and his client after a cosmetic procedure. Another depicted people gathering at a “Democracy Wall” in Beijing, where they wrote now-unthinkable criticisms of the government.

One of Liu’s most iconic images was captured on his way into the Time bureau after he had a strange feeling that something was “missing.” He turned his car around and, sure enough, a large portrait of Mao that had once hung prominently on a building had been freshly taken down. He quickly shot images of workers gathered around the depiction of the late Chairman, with some of their scaffolding visible in the frame.