Facebook's growth slowed significantly in the most recent quarter.

The Internet company reported lower sales than expected for the past three months on the Monday after the stock market closed and was also cautious with a view to the rest of the year.

Facebook made "considerable uncertainty" around Apple's new data rules partly responsible for its cautious forecast.

Roland Lindner

Business correspondent in New York.

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These guidelines make it difficult to collect user data that is relevant to the advertising business.

A few days ago, Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, blamed Apple's changed conditions for the weaker than expected numbers, so the news from Facebook was not entirely surprising.

After the hours of trading, the share price was initially even slightly higher.

Overall, the group reported a sales growth of 33 percent to 29.0 billion dollars for the third quarter, analysts had expected an average of 29.6 billion dollars.

In the second quarter, growth was still 56 percent, after which Facebook had already warned of a slowdown in the rest of the year.

For the final quarter, the company is only forecasting an increase in sales of between 12 and 21 percent.

"If the incentives don't change, Facebook won't change"

Facebook increased its net profit in the past quarter by 17 percent to 9.2 billion dollars.

Earnings per share of $ 3.22 were slightly higher than analysts expected.

The business results came just hours after an anticipated hearing with Frances Haugen before a committee of the UK Parliament. The former Facebook employee has been the source of a series of disclosures in the past few weeks that conveyed the image that the company is well aware of the risks of its platforms, but is doing little about it. Haugen recently testified before the American Congress. In the past few days there have been a number of other media reports based on internal Facebook documents that Haugen has brought to the public. Among other things, it was about the spread of misinformation about the US presidential elections last year and the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, as well as the consequences of hateful comments on Facebook in India.

In the more than two-hour hearing in London, Haugen reiterated her call for stricter regulation of Facebook. “If the incentives don't change, Facebook won't change.” She said the statistics Facebook often cited about how much malicious content was removed from its platforms didn't reflect reality. Facebook is "very good at dancing with data". Haugen also alluded to Facebook's latest announcement that 10,000 jobs would be created in Europe in order to advance CEO Mark Zuckerberg's strategy around the development of a so-called “metaverse”. Zuckerberg means a kind of virtual space and describes it as "the next generation of the Internet". Haugen now suggested that Facebook should rather use these placesto make its services more secure.

In the midst of all the controversy, Facebook is apparently considering a symbolic change. According to media reports, the company plans to announce its name change this week. Facebook's eponymous regular service would then be just one of many products.

In the quarterly report there was no mention of a possible renaming. However, the company announced that it wanted to change its financial reporting. In future, it wants to show results for two business pillars separately from one another: On the one hand, it should be the “family of apps”, which includes Facebook's regular service as well as platforms such as Instagram, Messenger and Whatsapp. In addition, the - presumably much smaller - category “Facebook Reality Labs” will be available in the future. This includes activities related to virtual reality ("Virtual Reality") and expanded reality ("Augmented Reality"), which Zuckerberg also sees as important building blocks in his "Metaverse" vision. Other hardware products should also be in this group. For example, Facebook recently launched computer glasses together with the Ray-Ban eyewear brand.