The results of a study funded by the European Union, that checked on the pulse of young social network users, indicate Facebook is in trouble, big trouble. Anthropologists revealed that as older users in Europe flock to use Facebook, the younger generation is looking elsewhere and moving on to other platforms.
The Global Social Media Impact Study looks into how users between the age of 16 and 18 years old are finding Facebook with the influx of parents and other older users. Respondents from eight member countries of the EU revealed that they are turning to other platforms such as Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
"What we've learned from working with 16-18 year olds in the UK is that Facebook is not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried. Mostly they feel embarrassed even to be associated with it. Where once parents worried about their children joining Facebook, the children now say it is their family that insists they stay there to post about their lives," wrote lead anthropologist Daniel Miller for the academic blog The Conversation.
"You just can't be young and free if you know your parents can access your every indiscretion. The desire for the new, also drives each new generation to find their own media and this is playing out now in social media. It is nothing new that young people care about style and status in relation to their peers, and Facebook is simply not cool anymore," Miller added.
Experts also took note that the youngsters in exodus from Facebook know that its platform is far more superior than that of the alternatives but the study reveals that these users look beyond functionality when making decisions.
While the older population is very much concerned about privacies on social media networks such as Facebook, teenagers really do not leave the network because of such issues nor use it as basis for choosing the platforms they will use.
"The questionnaires we applied this summer in our Italian fieldsite showed that around 40% of respondents who were on Facebook had never changed their privacy settings, which means their profiles were public. At the same time, more than 80% responded they were not concerned or did not care if an individual or an organization would use their personal data available on the platform," a blog post of University College London, which participated in the study, read.
The study does not really indicate the death of Facebook for now but merely looks into how a certain population of its users diversify their use of social media.
This is not the first time concerns arose that Facebook may not be attractive to the younger generation of users. In November, Facebook CFO David Ebersman said the site "did see a decrease in daily users, specifically among younger teens," prompting the company's COO Sheryl Sandberg to issue a clarification subsequently that "The vast majority of U.S. teens are on Facebook. And the majority of U.S. teens use Facebook almost every day."
