A week after Cambridge Analytica and despite #deletefacebook, Facebook app installs did not drop, no big advertisers quit, and analysts recommend buying the dip
As Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal spiraled into chaos this week, a frantic hail of notes from Wall Street analysts …
Context & Ripple Effects
The week's arc so far: a nearly $50B market-cap loss and Facebook's biggest trading day since 2014, then an independent forensics audit of Cambridge Analytica that had to stand down at the UK ICO's request. Behind the scenes, Facebook has been working the phones, with reassurance calls to ad agencies and trade bodies about customer-data protections.
This BuzzFeed report is the demand-side scorecard for all that activity: a week into #deletefacebook, app installs are flat, no major advertiser has walked, and Wall Street's response to the selloff is buy ratings. The scandal is registering in the share price, not yet in the two revenue-relevant behaviors — usage and ad spend.
First-order effects
- Facebook's advertiser base holds: with no big-brand exits, the company's revenue engine keeps running while it manages the crisis, validating its agency outreach as the immediate damage-control play.
- Analysts' buy-the-dip recommendations put a floor narrative under the stock after the $50B drawdown, directly shaping how institutional money prices the scandal's cost.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms get no advertiser-flight opening: since budgets aren't moving, competitors can't convert outrage into share this quarter and must wait for structural shifts instead.
- With consumer and advertiser behavior unchanged, the UK ICO's ability to halt even Facebook's own audit becomes the visible enforcement lever — regulatory pressure substitutes for market pressure.
Third-order effects
- If usage and ad spend prove this sticky through a scandal of this size, the effective constraint on platform data practices shifts from customers and advertisers to regulators — making bodies like the ICO, not churn, the mechanism that changes behavior.
- Internal reports that staff see the story as media hype suggest the episode may harden Silicon Valley's view that privacy scandals are survivable PR events rather than business-model threats.
The trend: User attention and ad budgets are proving far stickier than public outrage over data misuse, leaving regulators rather than the market as the binding check on platform privacy practices.