Is Facebook waning?
March 2021
It’s easy to forget that Facebook is 17 years old, and Twitter is 15. That may not seem much to us but in the fevered world of social media, it makes them close to fossilised. Most schoolchildren have never known a world without them.
However, they operate in a way which is increasingly unpopular, especially with the young. They are public facing: what you post on the sites is visible to everyone. This has become, dare I say it, a rather old fashioned way of using social media.
I’m convinced that we are seeing a gentle shift in attitudes that will lead to a significant move away from these public forums, and into more private and moderated ones.
I would welcome it; I’ve never found the soap-box platforms very attractive; I much prefer a private conversation to a megaphone at Speakers’ Corner.
I was discussing this with a group of 14-15 year olds recently, as part of a careers mentoring group (on Zoom, of course) and I was struck by how unattractive they regard these open platforms. They craved privacy, and cited many stories of friends who had been publicly humiliated on Facebook and the like.
This means that they have all migrated to the many private chat rooms and group communication methods like WhatsApp, or Discord (which grew out of the online game industry). There are plenty more; Signal and Telegram are two of the better known but there are any number of others.
Their key attraction for the young (and for me) is that you don’t use them to tell the world what you think, you use them to communicate with groups of people who are interested in the same thing, and where the members can control who takes part. If you misbehave, you’ll be ejected, as in any club.
It you use WhatsApp, and plenty of people over 65 do, then you are probably already in one or two private groups, even if it’s just for the family, or the book club. Messages posted there are encrypted and private; provided that you can trust the other members, they will stay that way.
It seems clear to me that the young take a more considered approach to privacy than many of their elders. I know of several young parents who have asked that nobody should post pictures or information about their children anywhere but in private groups, and it is becoming common for graduation ceremonies and other fairly public events to ban the public posting of pictures. I’ve even been to a wedding where this request appeared in the service sheet.
Furthermore, many of all ages are concerned by the muddle surrounding open platforms relative to free speech. This was brought to a head by the more or less wholesale removal of President Trump from them all, but it has been brewing for a while. I am uncomfortable with the idea that a company can act as judge and jury, but the libertarian in me says that they should be allowed to do what they like with their own equipment.
The truth is that the platforms have not yet worked out if they are publishers or not, and neither have we. Perhaps this is a symptom of their relative youth, perhaps it points to a lack of effective regulation.
In any event, I think it’s fair to say that some sort of wind of change, or at least a breeze, is blowing. This will be fanned not just by regulation, but by the shifting loyalties of those who use the platforms.
Cheeringly, however, I am confident that many of the youngsters who use them, and who have never known a non-internet world, appreciate the risks. Maybe older users should take heed.
A few relevant links
A list of alternative messaging systems
Someone on Wikipedia has put this list together – there are over 40 and I doubt that it’s complete:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_cross-platform_instant_messaging_clients
Statistics relating to WhatApp users and their age:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/611208/whatsapp-users-in-the-united-kingdom-uk-by-age-group/
Facebook users by age groups – showing that it’s definitely an older person’s medium.
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/new-social-media-demographics/#FB-demos
