“Facebook is not dead nor dying.” That Facebook director Tom Alison felt the need to state this explicitly in a press release, in March 2023, is a good indicator of the reputation the social media platform launched on February 4, 2004, suffers from.
“Old-fashioned.” “Dinosaur.” “It’s for old people!” This is how some internet users, responding to a call for responses from Le Monde, described the platform. And yet, as Alison claimed, Facebook is “in fact alive and thriving.” The latest quarterly figures, published on Thursday, February 1, speak for themselves: Every day, 2.11 billion people log on, the equivalent of a quarter of the world’s population – an increase of 6% in one year.
So is Facebook outdated? “The aging problem is serious,” alarmedly noted a Facebook researcher in 2021, in a memo revealed by the “Facebook Files.” For example, the number of American teenagers on the platform had then dropped by 13% in two years. The same observation applies to France. Sophie Jehel, a professor at l’Université Paris-VIII, analyzes the digital habits of thousands of 15 and 16-year-old students in Normandy every year. In 2018, 65% of them reported using Facebook. Today, only 31% do, based on the latest version of the report, to be published in February. They much prefer YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok. “When they still talk about Facebook, it’s to talk about their parents,” noted the researcher.
‘The social media platform of the working class’
The 31% who remain loyal to Mark Zuckerberg’s network “stay for family relationships,” noted Jehel, who pointed out that these young users “are often the most socially disadvantaged, with the least academic qualifications.”
And this observation is not limited to teenagers. In Facebook usage, “there’s a generational divide, but also a social one,” admitted Romain Badouard, lecturer at l’Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas. “It’s the social media platform of the working class. Behind the talk of being old-fashioned, there’s the idea that cultural, media and intellectual elites will favor other platforms.”
A form of snobbery, then. The researcher, a social media specialist, pointed out another bias: “Considering Facebook to be outdated is a Western point of view. As soon as you look beyond that, you realize that it’s still widely used and growing fast in the countries of the South.”
Three quarters of its daily active users are outside the United States, Canada and Europe. And while Facebook lost 1 million users in Europe between 2021 and 2023, and recorded “only” 10 million new registrations in the US and Canada, the platform gained 172 million users elsewhere in the world over the same period.
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