Zuckerberg has an ironclad hold on Facebook Inc. But he has so far been unable to address stagnating user growth and shrinking engagement for Facebook the product in key areas such as the United States and Europe. Worse, the company is losing the attention of its most important demographic — teenagers and young people — with no clear path to gaining it back, its own documents reveal.
In other words, the young see Facebook as a place for old people. Unless Facebook can find a way to turn this around, its population will continue to get older and young people will find even fewer reasons to sign on, threatening the monthly user figures that are essential to selling ads. So it can continue to expand its reach and power, Facebook has pushed for high user growth outside the U. But as it expanded into less familiar parts of the world, the company systematically failed to address or even anticipate the unintended consequences of signing up millions of new users without also providing staff and systems to identify and limit the spread of hate speech, misinformation and calls to violence.
But Facebook appears unable to acknowledge, much less prevent, the real-world collateral damage accompanying its untrammeled growth. Those harms include shadowy algorithms that radicalize users, pervasive misinformation and extremism, facilitation of human trafficking, teen suicide and more.
Internal efforts to mitigate such problems have often been pushed aside or abandoned when solutions conflict with growth — and, by extension, profit. Backed into a corner with hard evidence from leaked documents, the company has doubled down defending its choices rather than try to fix its problems. Zhang last year accused the social network of ignoring fake accounts used to undermine foreign elections.
The redacted versions received by Congress were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including The Associated Press. They detail painstakingly collected data on problems as wide-ranging as the trafficking of domestic workers in the Middle East, an over-correction in crackdowns on Arabic content that critics say muzzles free speech while hate speech and abuse flourish, and rampant anti-vaccine misinformation that researchers found could have been easily tamped down with subtle changes in how users view posts on their feed.
At this stage, that seems unlikely. Facebook has not said where the number stands today. Twitter has tested a Shop Module , which would allow direct sales on the platform, and YouTube allows merchants to add a Store page to their channel. But combined, these platforms reach around a billion fewer people than Facebook.
Recent headlines about Facebook being less than totally honest about data tracking, privacy, mental health warnings and censorship have likely pushed some users to emerging platforms like Telegram and Signal. I was one of those people who thought the platform was too popular to leave; that my family would leave me in self-exile — which after you think about it, is idiotic.
Not all families are the same. Feel free to share this infographic with anyone you know currently looking for the strength to dump FB. Skip to content. The world got a taste of life without Facebook and it wasn't easy.
So what happens if the social media giant is unplugged for good? By Peter K. This story originally appeared on LX. Our redesigned local news and weather app is live!
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