Facebook said users had spent millions of hours less on the platform in the final months of last year and North American daily active users had declined for the first time, even before it made the radical changes it believes will encourage a focus on “meaningful connections” rather than browsing.

Facebook表示，去年最后几个月，用户在其平台上花费的时间缩短了数百万个小时，北美每日活跃用户数量首次下降。事实上，这发生在Facebook采取一项在其看来将鼓励人们专注于“有意义的连接”而不是只进行浏览的重大变动之前。

The news initially sent its shares down as much as 5 per cent in after-hours trading, as investors digested the implications of a less-engaging Facebook.

最初，这一消息使Facebook股价在盘后交易中下跌5%，投资者试图消化Facebook的吸引力降低的影响。

But shares rebounded during the earnings call, as the company tried to convince analysts that a decline in engagement would not necessarily hit revenue growth.

但在Facebook的电话财报会议期间，该公司股价出现反弹。在会上，该公司试图说服分析师们相信，该公司的用户参与下降并不一定会影响收入增长。

Time on the site declined by roughly 50m hours every day in the latest quarter, about 5 per cent. The number of users in the US and Canada logging on every day fell by 700,000 to 184m.

在去年最后一个季度，用户每天花在Facebook网站上的时间大约减少了5000万个小时，下降5%左右。美国和加拿大每天登陆的用户数量下降70万至1.84亿。

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive, is pushing ahead with a transformation of its news feed this month, which it has warned will also hit engagement.

Facebook创始人兼首席执行官马克•扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)在1月推动了对Facebook动态消息(news feed)的改动，该公司警告称，此举也将影响用户参与度。

Investors have been eager to question executives about how the changes to Facebook’s news feed, designed to fill it with content from friends and family rather than publishers and businesses, will affect the company’s financials.

投资者迫切地向Facebook的高管们发问，希望获知对Facebook动态消息的改动将如何影响Facebook的财务表现。这一改动旨在使用来自用户朋友和家人，而非发行商和企业的内容来填充动态消息。

Last quarter, Facebook warned of a hit to future profitability from hiring 10,000 moderators. These are being deployed to tackle issues from violent and terrorist content to fake news and Russian disinformation.

上个季度，Facebook警告称，雇佣1万名内容审查员可能影响其未来的盈利能力。这些审查员的职责是解决从暴力和恐怖主义内容，到假消息和俄罗斯假情报等种种问题。