What’s bad for Facebook’s market cap might be good for society. That, at least, is what the company would like investors to take away from its disastrous second-quarter results, which triggered a fall in its stock-market valuation of almost $120bn (£92bn), the largest single loss of value in Wall Street history.

At its core, the collapse is due to three negative trends: a stagnant user base, shrinking revenues and growing costs. The first, Facebook argues, has been visible for years; the second is a blip as advertisers get used to new formats; and the third is a reflection of the significant sums the company is spending to fix the problems that have plagued it in the press over the past year.

It is the last of these that, from Facebook’s point of view, represents a social good. But for investors, doing the right thing carries a heavy cost.

Facebook has experienced a difficult year against the backdrop of a lack of user growth. In the US, its daily user base is stagnant; in the EU, it has shrunk by three million. Even worldwide, Facebook put on just 22 million users, driven largely by growth in India, Indonesia and the Philippines – less than half the growth seen in the previous quarter.

But that should not come as a surprise. In its most-developed markets, Facebook is simply running out of people: there are not enough Americans or Europeans alive for the company to double in size again. And on a global scale, Facebook is just as limited by access to the net itself: Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and chief executive, noted for the first time that 2.5 billion people use at least one of Facebook’s apps – an impressive figure made more so by the fact that there are only around 3.5 billion people in the world with access to the internet at all.

If the user base is as big as it’s going to get, then the growth needs to come from how much money it gets per user

The reduction in European users – a first – does offer pause. GDPR, the EU data regulation, has skimmed a million off the site’s daily reach, according to Zuckerberg, as users either bounce off the onerous request for new rights or delete their accounts outright in response. The Cambridge Analytica scandal too is likely to have played a part, with the site’s increasing toxic reputation prompting some to stay away.

But for smart investors, the user figures were visible in advance. The nastier shock was that Facebook’s ability to make money from those users has also taken a hit. Stories, a format ruthlessly cloned from Snapchat two years ago, is popular, fun, temporary and solves a problem the social network had suffered – that people are increasingly wary of posting content that will stick around forever. But Stories also simply isn’t as good at making money as the old Facebook feed, according to chief financial officer David Wehner.

If the user base is as big as it’s going to get, the growth needs to come from how much money Facebook gets per user. And if the future of the site is struggling to encourage advertisers to buy in, that’s an uncomfortable realisation.

And then there’s the positive side of the report – unless, that is, you own Facebook stock. Wehner told investors that the company is “making significant long-term investments” in safety and security: “Those investments are in the billions of dollars per year; those will have a negative impact on margins.” All told, the company’s costs are expected to grow by 50%-60%, and continue growing into 2019 faster than revenue.

Almost two years after the alarm started to be raised about Facebook’s influence on politics and society, the firm is starting to plough money into a solution. Wehner says: “We think that’s the right thing to do for the business in terms of ensuring the community’s safety and security ... but [the investments] don’t have obviously immediate translation into revenue dollars.”

It may not be the answer you want to hear if you have billions invested in Facebook, but it should be welcome to anyone who cares about the social network warping society.

Ministers and EDF should be feeling the heat over Hinkley Point

If the French nuclear industry can’t deliver on time on home turf, why should it perform any better on this side of the channel? That is the question many will be asking this week after EDF Energy announced further delays to its Flamanville 3 nuclear power station on the Normandy coast.

Inspections found that 33 of 148 welds were deficient, and will need repairs lasting into next summer.

The result is an extra €400m of cost, taking the total to €10.9bn, and a new plan to start commercial electricity generation being further delayed until 2020, rather than next year. The original date was 2012.

None of this bodes well for Hinkley Point C, the plant EDF is building in Somerset using the same technology, the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR).

So far the only EPR in the world to have been switched on is in Taishan, China. Another in Olkiluoto, Finland, is more than a decade late, and last year was delayed another five months, to May 2019.

EDF has already warned that the cost of Hinkley could climb from £18.1bn to £20.3bn, and that it may not start generating power until 2027, rather than 2025 as planned.

The company says it has learned lessons from the issues at Flamanville, but it has already had problems with concrete at Hinkley, and that’s before starting on the trickier nuclear parts of the plant.

Given that Hinkley is due to provide 7% of the UK’s electricity, any delays mean big headaches for the country. Energy security is unlikely to be at risk, because any gap would probably be filled by gas-fired power stations. But an increase in gas burning would make it even tougher for ministers to hit legally binding carbon budgets, which the UK is already set to overshoot.

As the climate-change-boosted heatwaves currently sweeping four continents remind us, that’s a target the world can’t afford to miss.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Construction equipment on the site of Hinkley Point C. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

TV is now about going with the streamers

Virgin Media’s 4 million TV customers have started their second week with a blackout of channels owned by UKTV, which range from Dave to Drama, with no end to the dispute in sight. At the same time, Disney has just been given the green light by shareholders for its $71bn takeover of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox.

These seemingly disparate issues are in fact connected, as the TV landscape goes through a tumultuous shift in the Netflix era.

At the heart of Virgin Media’s quarrel with UKTV (and part of its protracted negotiations with ITV) is on-demand TV rights. The BBC, co-owner of UKTV, holds back rights to its shows on UKTV, selling them instead to Netflix and Amazon and, potentially in the future, pooling them in a British rival to Netflix with ITV and Channel 4.

Virgin Media says TV shows have to come with digital rights, as that is what viewers want: this makes streaming and on-demand viewing increasingly important to broadcasters.

So to the Disney deal, which was prompted by fear of Netflix and others in the streaming world, including Amazon, Apple and Google. Rupert Murdoch decided to sell, offloading assets including the studio behind Deadpool, Avatar and the X-Men films, because he felt too small to compete with said digital rivals. His decision was prompted by the failure of his $80bn bid for Time Warner in 2014: get big or get out.

Disney – owner of a vast content library from the Marvel superhero films to the Star Wars franchise, Pixar kids films such as Toy Story as well as family films like Frozen – has pulled its content from Netflix in the US as it prepares its own streaming service.

Just like Virgin, Disney knows content is king, and buying Fox gives it crucial extra scale to take on the might of Netflix, with its $8bn annual content budget. The battle for the future of TV is focused on streamers who want to watch what they want, when they want.