Users are moving on from Facebook
‘Toxic mess’ helping drive many from social network
SAN FRANCISCO – Mikita Burton has had a Facebook account for nine years, nearly as long as her youngest child has been alive.
And, until arguments about the presidential election spread like a contagion throughout her news feed, she averaged three hours a day chatting with friends on the social network.
Now, she tops out at 20 minutes, has deleted the app from her phone and traded in Facebook for Instagram. The 41-year-old mother of three from Overland, Kan., posts on Facebook once a week, catching up with close friends by texting, calling or meeting them for coffee or happy hour.
“The less time I spent on Facebook, the better I felt,” says Burton, who works for the school district.
More than a dozen U.S. users interviewed by USA TODAY say they are starting to question their always-on relationship with the giant social network. Not only are they liking it less, they say they’re scaling back how much time they spend there. And those rumblings of growing Facebook fatigue are starting to show up in tracking data.
Nearly one in five Facebook users —
18.4% — say they are using Facebook less than they did a year ago, according to a new poll of 1,000 people by Honest Data, a market research firm run by pollster Tavis McGinn, who used to work at Facebook. That compares to
14% who said they increased their time and 28% who said their use remained the same. Measurements taken by research firm Comscore also show minutes spent on Facebook in the U.S. are declining.
“They had me at hello back in the day,” says Michael Brito, a 44-year-old digital marketer from Silicon Valley who dramatically reduced how much time he spends on Facebook after his news feed stopped reflecting his interests. “They need to reinvent that.”
Facebook used to be one of the happiest places on earth. People checked in throughout the day, reconnecting with former classmates and far-flung family members to share vacation photos and cat videos, marriage proposals and first steps, the loss of a job or the death of a parent. Along the way to wiring together about a third of humanity, Facebook became an advertising colossus, forging one of the Internet’s most successful businesses valued by investors at a halftrillion dollars.
It’s still everyone’s favorite online hub, with more than 2 billion members
logging in monthly. But some of those users have started to stray.
Arguments over fake news and partisan politics are driving pixelated wedges between friends. Watching highlight reels of other people’s lives makes them feel depressed and inadequate. They worry they’ve become hooked on dopamine hits from likes and comments on their posts. Even worse, some Facebook users sense the time they spend on Facebook is distancing friends and family members from one another and making everyone feel lonelier.
For years, Brenda Rivera obsessively checked Facebook for updates from friends and family. She describes the experience like a daily soap opera, and she couldn’t bear to miss an episode. Then Rivera realized she had developed a full-blown social media addiction. Now she limits herself to 45 minutes a day and tries to stay off Facebook on weekends.
“I love that I can be connected to friends and family and see events and happenings, interact and laugh or cry. But it also has a dark side,” said Rivera, a 52-year-old photographer and fitness instructor from Cedar Park, Texas. “You don’t even realize it, but you log in just to check your feed and 30 minutes later, you don’t realize you have been on that long.”
Facebook stopped revealing how much time people spend on the network in 2016. Last month, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told investors that users spent 50 million fewer hours a day on the social network in the fourth quarter. He attributed the decline to changes Facebook is making to show more posts from friends and family that spark “meaningful” social interactions and downgrading links to articles and videos, which encourage people to passively scroll through your news feed. Facebook executive Adam Mosseri said this week at Recode’s Code Media conference that Facebook is still trying to understand and measure what’s meaningful to people.
The tipping point for those who have cut back on Facebook this time: The personal mudslinging that has continued in the tense political climate following the presidential election.
Lisa Brown, the 53-year-old caretaker to her elderly mother and a Trump supporter from Pekin, Ill., says she logs in to Facebook to catch up on news of her two adult daughters and videos of her 18-month- old granddaughter. But her use dwindled as partisan fireworks raged.
“There’s a lot of the political stuff on there right now with Trump in office,” says Brown, who has unfriended a few people and has been unfriended by a few. “It’s a toxic mess.”
Libby Pelham, a 54-year-old Web developer and business analyst from Lakeland, Tenn., says she took refuge in Facebook groups that ban political talk in favor of lighter fare such as sharing recipes. “I had crazy Democrat friends ranting and crazy Republican friends ranting,” Pelham said in an email. “I felt like it was affecting my mental health just being bombarded with all this information.”
Breaking up with Facebook isn’t easy by design. It taps into people’s complex emotional and psychological needs and surfaces status updates that keep them boomeranging for more. And, if people spend long stretches away from Facebook, reminder emails alerting users to friends’ photos and comments are one way Facebook tries to coax them back.
Facebook, which owns a family of apps, also knows how to adapt when people’s time and attention wanders elsewhere. When the growing popularity of photo-sharing service Instagram became digital catnip for Facebook users, Facebook bought it. Same with messaging app WhatsApp.
Teen messaging favorite Snapchat rejected Facebook’s buyout offers, so Facebook and its other apps have instead copied Snapchat features in hopes of luring young people. But new research from eMarketer predicts that, for the first time, less than half of U.S. Internet users ages 12 to 17 will use Facebook this year.
Some say they have withdrawn from Facebook after realizing it had become a habit they were having trouble kicking. One user described getting the shakes when she hadn’t peeked at her news feed for a few hours.
Alarm bells about the addictive properties of Facebook have been sounded by researchers and even by executives who helped build the company. A new campaign from Common Sense Media is putting pressure on tech giants to make their products less addictive, particularly for kids. One tech CEO, Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff, recently suggested Facebook should be regulated like the tobacco industry.
Others complain that Facebook has turned into “Fakebook” or “Bragbook” where friends project an image, not their authentic selves. Pals showing off vacation photos from exotic destinations or bragging about their children’s educational accomplishments ends up making them feel badly about their own lives.