Someone needs to interface with governments and law enforcements when they request data in criminal investigations. Someone needs to interface with lawmakers when new legislation is passed. Someone needs to handle data privacy requests from Europe. There's a lot of people working on this, or were at least.

Don't forget conspiring with the government to censor what can be seen/thought: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...

And not just one government. Every country you want to operate in.

Instagram had around 10M users at acquisition too when it was acquired a decade ago. IG has way way more staff now that they have scale. Must we continue to compare Apples and Oranges?

> Instagram had around 10M users at acquisition

No, they had 30M:

https://www.vox.com/2017/4/9/15235940/facebook-instagram-acq...

>What tooling do they provide for governments?

This right here is why you can discount most replies on HN right off the bat. The "I can make software X in a day" posts are 99% bullshit because the posters making them have idea what business reality look like. If their program gained any popularity they'd be in a panic the first time the FBI dumped a warrant in their lap and their full stack developer is now spending a week with the lawyer trying to figure out how to untangle their data while the customers that paid for ads are yelling the metrics API went down 2 days ago.

Agreed, there's decent starter comparables in the space.. IG, FB, DC, Goog all have public numbers. I've cobbled these together in the past week talking through with old friends from Goog and others. Please correct!

IG 13 employees at 30m users. Couldn't find # of servers.

FB had 10k servers in 2008 and 100m users, 850 employees.

I believe Doubleclick had ~500-1000 servers for ~10b daily impressions in mid-2000s.

Those numbers are all on circa 2010 hardware, so.. divide by a decade of performance doubling every 2 years (conservatively), or ~5x fewer servers in 2020.

The government takedown stuff, from personal experience, is tiny on the systems side; much more about moderators and expensive legal staffing.

These are very rough estimates, but I've heard 250k servers for Twitter.. that's much more on par with Goog/Amzn/Msft serving clouds at ~1m+ machines. That's a mystery to me.