According to a study by the Pew Research Center, facebook has now become complete not relevant in adolescents. It is used by only 32% of children between the ages of 13 and 17. Way back in 2015, when the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg could reach 71% of teens.
The so-called Gen Z today it is being swept by other platforms, such as Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. “Facebook is giving teens the same kind of emotion they would get from reading a spam email these days,” conclude Pew Research Center analysts.
According to the study, there are about five different platforms today that can provide a “potentially infinite” scroll feed, but of course people’s time is not nearly that infinite. It follows that users prefer using two or three platforms. In this intense war to win people’s attention, Facebook has failed to give teenagers the right incentives. Hence the constant loss of ground in favor of alternative products, including Instagram, also owned by Meta.
In reality, the social network has never really warmed the hearts of the very young. This was already apparent from the conclusions of the 2013 study conducted by the Pew Research Center: “While Facebook is well integrated into the daily lives of adolescents,” the researchers wrote nearly a decade ago, “it is often seen as a kind of compulsory attendance. or at least linked to some form of utility and not entertainment”.
Today, Facebook no longer has that “social network to absolutely attend” role, on pain of missing out on basic updates about the lives of loved ones, or being cut off from the school’s thousands of groups and subgroups.
The conclusions of the Pew Research Center study are similar in every way to those of the same internal Facebook study “Young people view Facebook as a social network visited by 40 or 50 year olds“, read one of the internal files of the company of Mark Zuckerberg. Files that should have been kept secret, but which were made public in 2021 by the mole “Frances Haugen. “The content published on Facebook is perceived by young people as ‘boring, false or negative'”.
According to Facebook’s own internal estimates, the social network will continue to lose its bite among teenagers going forward. Without a major change of course, Facebook will become completely irrelevant among all younger demographics.
Source: Lega Nerd
