Facebook has gone astray. Is it too late to fix it?
Facebook has lost its way.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the social networking behemoth veered off course. But as for how and why, that’s easy to nail down.
Facebook has a friends and family problem, meaning the tight-knit social fabric that drew us in—important or heart-warming posts from our moms, dads, sisters, brothers and besties—has all but unraveled. Instead, in our News Feed, we’re left with partially satisfying updates from loose connections, the day’s news and the ensuing rants, and videos we never asked to see.
We are, in part, to blame. When Facebook told us to “like” Pages, we did. When Facebook encouraged us to “follow” celebrities and media companies, we did that, too. And, of course, some of us couldn’t help boosting our “friend” count just for the sake of appearing popular.
But, really, it all comes back to Mark Zuckerberg’s long-stated mission of making us “more open and connected,” a philosophy that couldn’t be further from reinforcing the types of private and meaningful connections most of us crave. And so Facebook’s algorithm has taken over, pushing us to perform sympathy likes that repeat the cycle of updates from distant acquaintances, promoting the company’s own changing business interests and prioritizing content based on social cues that don’t appear to be processed on a human level.
No wonder today’s teenagers have decidedly relegated Facebook to second-tier social status, now finding it far less arresting than its hipper cousins YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat. Or, as this week’s Pew Research Center report highlighting Facebook’s fourth-place ranking put it: “The social media landscape in which teens reside looks markedly different than it did as recently as three years ago.”
Let’s belabor this point a bit longer. In the three years between 2015 and 2018, a seismic shift in teen attention took place. A large majority, or 71 percent, of teenagers (ages 13 to 17) were using Facebook in 2015 and now just about half (51 percent) of them are using the social network. In Facebook’s place are Instagram and Snapchat, now used by 72 percent and 69 percent of teens, respectively.
Maybe it’s as simple as teens not wanting to be Internet friends with their folks. It’s probably more nuanced than that. Teens have instinctively gravitated to the two platforms that don’t confuse personal ties with public personas. For the latter, they have taken to Instagram. Meanwhile, they’re getting their real-friend fix from Snapchat, where sharing for the sake of attention plays second fiddle to engaging in private exchanges.
The catch-all social network just doesn’t work for them.
And it doesn’t work for us adults either. The difference is we continue to default to Facebook. But for how much longer?
Facebook knows there’s a problem. The company’s “Here Together” TV ad tells us as much, even if it was primarily prompted by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. That ad, though, is spot on. It starts with this simple truth: “We came here for the friends … but then something happened.” And the ad’s promise—to keep us safer and protect our privacy “so we can all get back to what made Facebook good in the first place: friends”—is great, if only we could trust the company to follow through.
Sadly, that “something” isn’t just the spam, click bait, fake news and data misuse identified in the ad. That something is Facebook itself, which thrives not on our friendships, but on our behavioral data. And thrive it does. The company raked in a healthy $12 billion in revenue, primarily from selling mobile ads, from January through March.
For its part, the company has been making pro-friend adjustments to News Feed since January.
“Facebook was built to bring people closer together,” a Facebook spokesperson said via email to me. “Earlier this year, we made changes to prioritize posts that inspire discussion in the comments and posts that you might want to share and react to. We’ll continue to focus on these updates to ranking so people have more opportunities to interact with the people they care about.”
But the damage is done. We’ve liked, commented and shared our way to News Feed ambivalence and we’re kind of stuck. Fourteen years later, our lives are housed inside Facebook, after all.
If we’re lucky, though, this disconnect will finally open the door for a newcomer to create the place that Facebook could have, and should have been.