What happened to you in the last 20 years? Maybe you've fallen in love, had your heart broken, moved cities or even countries, had a child or two, discovered a new passion, dealt with depression, suffered the pain of a loved one. Facebook is now twenty years old. It remains the largest social network in the world, despite a gradual decline in cultural irrelevance with younger generations. Today it has more than 3 billion active monthly users; This means one third of the world's population.
But Facebook's age is starting to show, and like most people you know, it's strayed from its original purpose of bringing people together (for free) and helping friends stay in touch.
Scroll through Facebook today and you'll see fewer posts from your real friends, more sponsored ads harassing you to buy things you're looking for online, fake news articles with thousands of comments from conspiracy theorists, and old family friends documenting everything. Summary of their lives with blurry photos and embarrassing captions.
Over the dozen or so years I've been using Facebook, my profile has evolved from a less fun version of Myspace to a place where I air my daily grievances as a college student and post hundreds of awful, pinpointed photos. Take a camera to a digital wasteland where the last comment on the “Timeline” is a three-year birthday wish from a former colleague.
Since then, I've made my birth date private to avoid the stress of thanking dozens of semi-strangers who show up like weeds once a year. And if I didn't need Facebook for my job, I would probably have deleted my profile by now.
As my profile gathers dust and Facebook celebrates its 20th anniversary, I wonder: Can the social network still claim to be culturally relevant? Facebook wasn't the first social network, of course, but it was the first social network that spread like a virus across borders and generations, changing the way people interact with each other, organize social movements, and consume news.
Along with Twitter, it has become an instrument of social change and sparked debates that have led to movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the attack on the Brazilian congress in 2023.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook as a 19-year-old college student, suddenly found himself at the center of a debate about the limits of free speech, amid criticism that Facebook wasn't doing enough to combat misinformation. Hate speech.
Regulators in the US and EU are still going after Zuckerberg over misinformation that surfaced on the site during the Coronavirus outbreak. Under the EU's new Digital Services Act, Meta is responsible for monitoring and removing misinformation and illegal content on its platforms.
As for Facebook's mission, Zuckerberg has expanded the platform's functions to maintain a viable business model, prioritizing ad revenue and data collection over actual user interaction.
In 2019, Zuckerberg changed the platform's slogan from "Free and always will be" to "Quick and easy," paving the way for Facebook's new paid, ad-free subscription model. Two years later, Facebook's parent company renamed itself "Meta" as it invested heavily in metadata research.
It also increased video content on Facebook and Instagram (also a Meta brand), added the Facebook marketplace where people can buy and sell products, and expanded messaging capabilities with the development of Messenger and the acquisition of WhatsApp.
Franken's platform now bears little resemblance to the Facebook of yesteryear, as it combines features from other popular social media sites such as Reddit, TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat.
An aging user base, increasingly global reach
Facebook may still be the cornerstone of any social media marketing campaign, but its user base is aging.
Although the number of Generation Y users is decreasing, Generation Y still prefers the application. A 2022 survey found that 2021% preferred Facebook to other social media, up from 75% in 69.
Younger generations are even less interested in Facebook; While only 37% of Gen Z users say they are active on Facebook, 65% of Gen Z users say they are on TikTok.
Although this is a very real problem for the company and has led to statements that “Facebook is dead,” the latest user numbers from early February suggest anything but that.
2,11 billion people log in to Facebook every day; This is a 6% increase in one year. But three-quarters of these daily users are outside the US, Canada and Europe.
So while Facebook is losing users in Europe and seeing slowing growth in the US and Canada, it is gaining tens of millions of users worldwide. Facebook's largest market is India with 315 million users.
The way people use Facebook is also changing, adapting to the platform's new Algorithm that focuses on viral content rather than friendship.
"There's been a shift over the last few years where people are coming to Facebook more to have fun, discover something new, or see what's going on in the world," Facebook executive Tom Alison wrote in a press release last March announcing a new AI. enhanced exploration feature.
“Previously, you could be invited to a (Facebook) Group by a friend, search for a Group based on a specific need or interest,” Alison explained. “By using AI to find public Group content based on your interests, we can now show you highly relevant content from public Groups in your Feed without having to do any searching or word of mouth to uncover a Group.”
It turns out Alison's vision for the future of Facebook isn't friendship. At least not with humans.
For now, it looks like the future of Facebook will be driven by algorithms that will show you more of what you want to see. It's a good strategy to keep people on the platform, but it's also a step further towards dividing users into select echo chambers and self-selected biases.
It will likely take less than 20 years to see the effects of Facebook's new AI-focused strategy on user behavior and beliefs.
But who knows where the world will be by then? Or how much more heartbreak and triumph will we all experience as our Facebook profiles continue to gather dust in those long-forgotten browser tabs we forgot to close?
