[Nelson69]

Plus there are a ton of over 64 folks on there...

Riddle me this: why would they lie? Shareholders could sue, since they try to infer some value from it there could be other legal consequences. If they only had, say 1billion daily active users instead of 1.56billion, would that really water their value down much? I don't see a competitor coming to eat their lunch that would rationalize lying about that stuff.

[polishTar]

Also, why would they even care about reporting high numbers? Facebook's leadership doesn't have any of the typical business pressures to please investors. Leadership (Zuckerberg) already holds majority voting power, and Facebook is fully self sufficient financially (no concerns about needing to raise more capital at poor prices).

[the_watcher]

They're definitely in a unique position, but there's always simply not wanting to crush their investor relations department, not that I have any evidence or suspicions that this factors in at all.

[the_watcher]

Flat growth numbers would water down their value, particularly in developed markets, as we saw last July. But more to your point, these number are so astoundingly high, and have been for years that you're really asking "why would they ever have overestimated these numbers?", which gets to the same point.