Facebook Usage: Who Is Abandoning Ship?
July 15, 2019
It is hard to imagine any social media platform being declared “old,” but Generation Z has already labeled Facebook as thing nobody uses anymore except grandparents sharing photos. Wandering attention spans and cooler Internet places lure younger users away, but there is another reason Facebook usage is down says The Guardian in the story, “Facebook Usage Falling After Privacy Scandals, Data Suggests.” Since April 2018, Facebook activity, including likes, shares, and posts, have dropped 20%, then usage picked up, but circa fall and winter 2018 they fell yet again.
Why is this happening to still one of the top social median platforms? The answer lays in how it handles privacy:
“The decline coincided with a series of data, privacy and hate speech scandals. In September the company discovered a breach affecting 50m accounts, in November it admitted that an executive hired a PR firm to attack the philanthropist George Soros, and it has been repeatedly criticized for allowing its platform to be used to fuel ethnic cleansing in Myanmar.”
Facebook is a social communication tool and not the problem itself. The problem is with the people who run and use, such as the attack on Soros and fueled hatred fires in Myanmar. (Does anyone else think about the Rwanda genocide, except radios were used instead of social media?). Facebook is a crazy, yet necessary tool in today’s wacko world. Despite the breaches, Facebook continues to grow
Users say that while they maintain their accounts, they are not using them as much or they have deleted them entirely. The younger crowds continue to stay away and there are more alluring Web sites to connect with than Facebook.
DarkCyber believes that Facebook chug along. At some point, most users may be law enforcement and intelligence professionals. But $5 billion fines and zero regulatory oversight suggest that whatever content is in Facebook, it has value to some people—for now.
Senior citizens do love looking at pix of their grandchildren.
Whitney Grace, July 15, 2019
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