US Users Are Leaving Facebook by the Millions, Research Says (marketplace.org)

An anonymous reader shares a report: All the bad press about Facebook might be catching up to the company. New numbers from Edison Research show an an estimated 15 million fewer users in the United States compared to 2017. The biggest drop is in the very desirable 12- to 34-year-old group. Marketplace Tech got a first look at Edison's latest social media research. It revealed almost 80 percent of people in the U.S. are posting, tweeting or snapping, but fewer are going to Facebook.

Comments

No, they're not

[DogDude]

They're just moving from one of Facebook's data collecting websites (facebook.com) to a different one (instagram.com). They're still giving Facebook roughly the same amount of data.

Re:No, they're not

[JaredOfEuropa]

And once people actually jump ship to a completely different and new platform, FB will just buy that. With promises to not harvest data or share it with other divisions, and the founders quitting in disgust (and a couple billion richer) when FB breaks that promise.

Re:No, they're not

[L_R_Shaw]

The problem for Facebook is the amount of personal data that is uploaded to Instagram is vastly less valuable.

Instagram accounts are for the most part just a username, some banal tag line, and a bunch of emojis along with the stream of lifestyle photos. Valuable, yes, but nowhere near the comprehensive personal data that Facebook users were uploading to their accounts.

Re:No, they're not

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not even leaving because of the "bad press," which is what TFA is implying. They really don't give a shit about that. The reason they're leaving Facebook is because they've moved on to the new "shiny thing". They don't really care about bad press, or that they're moving from one sector of data-mining to another. They only care what everyone else is connecting with and keeping up with their peers.

Re:No, they're not

[Oswald McWeany]

The problem for Facebook is the amount of personal data that is uploaded to Instagram is vastly less valuable.

Instagram accounts are for the most part just a username, some banal tag line, and a bunch of emojis along with the stream of lifestyle photos. Valuable, yes, but nowhere near the comprehensive personal data that Facebook users were uploading to their accounts.

With improvements to photo recognizing algorithms, those photos could become more valuable than text.

Re:"Users"

[timholman]

I've seen very few people actually leaving Facebook...

There's no need to shut down your account if you simply stop using the platform, which is very much what I am observing. I have unfollowed so many people (because they couldn't resist screeching about politics or religion, or sharing clickbait memes), and blocked so many clickbait sites (e.g. "only 0.1% can answer this correctly", "what dog do you look like", etc.) that my feed is a pale shadow of what it used to be. My real friends (as opposed to FB friends) report the same thing. I simply don't feel a need to check Facebook much anymore. There's nothing interesting going on. If I need to reach out to friends quickly, I message them instead.

I do not doubt that Facebook engagement metrics are dropping in the U.S. Forget the bot accounts. It's the real users leaving who worry them.

bad press is not the problem

[jsepeta]

Mark Zuckerberg's lack of ethics is the problem. We're the product and we don't want to be bought, sold, or processed.