By Julie E 
Photo Creedit (Pixeles)
In its own words, Facebook is not dead. For years, young people have been saying that Facebook is only for “old people,” but Facebook wants you to know that that’s not the case.
With TikTok, its greatest rival, coming under closer scrutiny from the government in the wake of rising tensions between the US and China, Facebook may be able to present itself as a domestically produced alternative.
One catch, though: many of Devin Walsh’s generation have already gone on.
When was the last time I logged in? I have no idea. The 24-year-old public relations professional from Manhattan, Walsh, speculated that it must have happened a long time ago.
Instead, she spends five or six minutes each day scrolling around Instagram, another platform owned by Meta, the parent company of Facebook. Of course, there’s TikTok, where she spends approximately one hour daily scrolling and allowing the algorithm to discover topics “I didn’t even know I was interested in.”
After joining Facebook in sixth grade, Walsh simply cannot see a future where it is not an integral part of her daily existence.
“The branding, isn’t it? “When I think of Facebook, I picture cheugy, older people, random status updates, parents posting pictures of their kids, and people fighting about political issues,” Walsh added, using the Gen Z phrase for things that are decidedly not cool.
The hip social networking site that debuted before the iPhone is going strong on twenty years. Although it has gradually receded into the background over the years, for those who came of age around the time Mark Zuckerberg established Facebook.com from his Harvard dorm room in 2004, it has been inseparably embedded into daily life.
Facebook is up against an unusual problem. Even now, three billion people use it monthly. There are over 330 million people on the planet. Plus, two billion people use it daily. Even though it has been around for twenty years, it is still fighting for its future and relevance.
It is most certainly not the place for the younger generation, including those who enrolled while in middle school and those who are still in that grade. Facebook runs the danger of becoming utilitarian and dull, similar to email, without this trend-setting population. Facebook is still the primary source of revenue for parent firm Meta.
This isn’t how things were always. Facebook was the talk of the town for almost ten years, a cultural touchstone, something people brought up in casual conversation or on late-night television, and the subject of a Hollywood film about its creation. Launched a year before Facebook, rival MySpace was soon deemed uncool as hipsters flocked to Facebook. The 2005 sale of MySpace to the stodgy old News Corp. didn’t improve matters.
We were all forced to become mini-coders so that we could have a MySpace, yet nobody understood how technology worked. It was this strange mix. Oh, the tension! Moira Gaynor, a 28-year-old Facebook may have even gotten its start because of that. Since we had such a hard time with MySpace, we really wanted something more, and this engagement section was gorgeous, integrated, and wonderful—exactly what we got.
In an effort to portray himself as a visionary, Zuckerberg clung to Facebook and saw it through the mobile revolution. Facebook seemed invincible as it surged, seemingly unaffected by problems surrounding user privacy and an inadequate response to hate speech and disinformation. A few competitors did arise, but they mostly faded away, like Orkut. In 2015, it hit one billion users per day.
Although the number of younger users on Facebook has been declining, Insider Intelligence analyst Debra Aho Williamson, who has been following the company since its inception, does not believe that Facebook will disappear any time soon.
I think it’s a credit to what Mark created while he was a college student that we are talking about Facebook turning 20 years old. Her words were accompanied by awe. “All across the globe, it remains a highly effective platform.”
Even AOL had its heyday, but as its user base has gotten older, having an AOL.com email address is now more of a running joke about how tech-savvy individuals of a certain age are.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Facebook’s chief executive officer (Zuckerberg is officially known as Meta CEO) Tom Alison seemed hopeful as he described the company’s strategies to attract young adults.
Alison described a time when Facebook had a staff whose concentration was on younger generations, as well as one or two projects whose sole purpose was to generate fresh ideas. “And we rejected it around two years ago, stating that we needed to rethink and revamp our whole product line to meet the demands of today’s youth.”
This is the age of “social discovery,” he says.
We’re driven by the desires of the next generation when it comes to social media. “In a nutshell, what we want Facebook to be is a platform where people can connect with the people they already know, as well as those they are interested in getting to know,” Alison explained.
This strategy revolves around artificial intelligence. Facebook is attempting to reclaim the attention and affection of young adults by mimicking TikTok’s use of artificial intelligence and algorithms to suggest films users would like. Additionally crucial are reels, which are videos similar to TikTok that users of Facebook and Instagram are inundated with upon logging into both platforms. Additionally, there is private texting.
Alison explained that Facebook is once again becoming a platform where users can find relevant content, share it with others, and have meaningful conversations about it. The company is also integrating messaging features into the app to cater to users’ desire to share and discuss reels.
Facebook has always been tight-lipped about its user demographics, which would reveal a lot about its performance among millennials and Gen Zers. A team of independent researchers, however, has found that their numbers are actually going down. Similarly, Facebook appears to have retreated from aggressively recruiting kids due to worries about the impact of social media on their mental health.
A lot of the time, the next generation decides how communication will work. Facebook simply became popular because young people flocked to it. That, according to Williamson, is true of virtually every social media site that has emerged after Facebook. Half of TikTok’s users fall in the 12-to 24-year-old age range, according to Insider’s forecasts for this year.
Aside from the fact that Insider’s projections only extend until 2026, Williamson also doesn’t see this trend turning around. The deterioration is gradual yet noticeable. In comparison to TikTok and Instagram, where 42% and 46% of users are under the age of 34, the research firm predicts that 28% of Facebook users in the US will fall into that age bracket that year. Teens in the 12–17 age bracket have even more striking statistics.
They should stop trying to be a social platform, in my opinion. As if they’ve forgotten about that. But why not? They have the option to become the next Yellow Pages. stated Gaynor, a federal employee residing in San Diego, California. Marketplace is great. That is where I sourced the majority of my furnishings since I have just relocated.