Facebook Inc.’s many recent challenges on the societal front, from Russian fake news to findings that it can make people unhappy, haven’t yet taken a toll on its financials.

That’s apparent from fourth-quarter results reported today, which showed a company continuing to beat expectations thanks to a freight train of an advertising business. But investors are clearly watching whether a raft of changes to the site to address the many issues raised in the past year could slow time spent on the site, which ultimately drives ad revenue.

The social networking giant said profit before certain costs such as stock compensation rose 20 percent, to $4.3 billion or $1.44 a share. Revenue shot up 47 percent, to $12.97 billion.

Analysts had forecast a profit of $1.94 a share, up 60 percent, on a revenue rise of 42 percent, to $12.55 billion. However, Facebook took a onetime $3.2 billion charge for income taxes from repatriation of overseas profits related to the tax act. Operating profit before that charge jumped 61 percent, to $7.4 billion, or $2.21 a share, smashing forecasts.

Still, investors initially didn’t like what they saw. After closing at $186.89, shares fell more than 4 percent in early after-hours trading. However, as executives on the earnings conference call hammered home their belief that site changes won’t hurt advertising revenue, shares recovered to nearly a 2 percent uptick, close to the all-time high of $190.66. Update: In Thursday trading, shares were up 4 percent.

It’s likely investors are most concerned about slowing user growth and, more to the point concerning Facebook’s ad business, how much time they’re spending on the platform. The number of daily active users rose 14 percent in the quarter, to 1.4 billion, a hair under analysts’ estimates, and monthly active users rose the same percentage, to 2.13 billion.

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) may have fed fears of lower engagement in prepared remarks, in which he said Facebook is focused on making sure it “isn’t just fun to use, but also good for people’s well-being and for society.” He added that changes in that direction in the fourth quarter, such as reducing the number of viral videos shown, reduced time spent on the site by about 5 percent, or 50 million hours a day, a little over two minutes per daily user.

On the earnings conference call, as well as a post on Facebook, Zuckerberg emphasized the idea that the changes will result in more quality time spent on Facebook interacting with people rather than passively watching content. “We expect the time we spend on Facebook will be more valuable … and the business will be stronger over time,” he said. In addition, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg insisted that a higher-quality experience on the site will over time make it more attractive to advertisers.

Another key concern of investors recently has been cost. The company said last fall that operating expenses will rise 45 to 60 percent from a year ago, partly because of the costs of more carefully monitoring content on the platform. However, total costs and expenses rose only 32 percent in the fourth quarter.

In any case, the results didn’t change the status quo in online advertising that has Facebook and Google LLC commanding close to half of all spending and virtually all the growth in the market, according to Pivotal Research Group. EMarketer reckons this year, Facebook will have 18.4 percent of the $266 billion market, second only to Google’s 31.3 percent share.

And it doesn’t look like that situation will affect Facebook’s top line, least of all as a result of widespread criticism of online advertising-driven platforms. Google parent Alphabet Inc. will report its fourth-quarter results on Thursday, but Facebook’s results indicate little impact from this criticism yet.

One reason is that Facebook’s scale and audience targeting remain attractive to marketers. “Changes to the algorithm shouldn’t make brands and publishers look to spend less on ads,” Socialbakers CEO Yuval Ben-Itzhak told SiliconANGLE. “On the contrary, Facebook still gives them the biggest potential reach, as well as the best targeting capabilities for the best performance on every dollar spent.”

Still, the intensifying criticism not only worries analysts, but it has prompted Facebook, Google and others such as Twitter Inc. to change both what they surface in search results and news feeds and what kinds of ads they will accept. In early January, Zuckerberg said his annual personal challenge this year would be fixing important issues such as “protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.”

Since then, the company has announced that it will rank posts by users higher than those shared by businesses. This week Facebook said it also will prioritize local news sources over national and international outlets in an attempt to reduce the focus on divisive national issues. On the call, Sandberg also focused on Facebook’s efforts to provide better ad transparency and quality.

“Dealing with those issues could pressure revenues,” Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser wrote in a note to clients today. But he added, “Our interactions with marketers suggest that any concerns they have can still be alleviated by Facebook’s sheer scale and its relative utility vs. alternatives in digital media.”

But whether these changes will affect Facebook’s relentless growth will remain a big question for investors and analysts for the months and years ahead.

“The bottom line is that ’18 is going to be a pivotal year for FB,” Macquarie Capital (USA) Inc. analyst Ben Schachter wrote in a note to clients “Revenue growth is going to slow, investments are ramping, and success on video is going to be key….  We fear that the cultural/political climate could still impact the company in unknown ways.”

Photo: Facebook