It's been a tough few years for Facebook. Between the outbreak of fake news, ongoing privacy concerns regarding data collection, and threats of government regulations, the world's most popular social media platform has taken a major hit. Now it looks like many Facebook users are simply sick of it.
Edison Research asked Facebook users why they used the platform less frequently, and the respondents painted a fairly clear picture. The most common reasons were a disdain for Facebook rants, too much politics, and an overwhelming sense of negativity. These responses allow us to assume that users are simply exhausted by the online environment Facebook has created.
That overwhelming sense of exhaustion has ultimately led to longtime users being unhappy with the service, while younger people are either leaving Facebook or not signing up to join like they were a decade ago. In 2017, 67 percent of the US population over the age of 12 had a Facebook account. However, by 2018, that number had dropped by 5 percent, and in 2019, only 61 percent of the population was on Facebook.
If this dip is, in fact, caused by a lack of younger users, it's coming at the exact wrong time, because Facebook is seeing tough competition from Tiktok right now. In 2019, a survey from Morning Consult shows that the video-sharing app was used by the same percentage of US users (42 percent) in the 13-to-16-year-old bracket as Instagram (41 percent) and Twitter (40 percent).
It should be noted that Facebook still has 172 million users in the United States and 1.5 billion users worldwide, so it's not as though the company is in danger of going under. But Facebook's growth has already flatlined in its most valuable markets. Recruiting a new generation of young users should be the way forward for the company, but that has not happened.
As of November 2019, Statista reports that the 13-to-17 age bracket is by far the platform's lowest percentage of users. Gen Z is projected to become the largest US consumer population by 2026, so if something doesn't change for Facebook, this could be the beginning of the end.