Teens have abandoned Facebook, Pew study finds

Gen Z internet use is on the rise, but the speed at which teens use Facebook is rapidly declining. A Pew Research Center study on teens, technology and social media found that only 32% of teens aged 13-17 use Facebook, but in a previous survey from 2014-2015, that figure was 71%. beating platforms like Instagram and Snapchat.

Jules Terpak, a Gen Z content creator covering digital literacy, told TechCrunch that teens no longer find value in Facebook.

"There are now well over five highly-positioned social media platforms to endlessly scroll through, and it's not sustainable for our minds to compartmentalize or prioritize our relationship with each of them," said Terpak by email. "For the sake of time and common sense, people should weed out platforms that are starting to lack value-added incentive."

Terpak thinks that Facebook, which teenagers often associate with their parents, doesn't have much to offer Gen Z.

“The culture cultivated by the average Facebook user is very disconnected from what attracts Gen Z to a platform today, rather exuding the energy of a spam,” she said .

Even in 2013, when 77% of online teens used Facebook, young users still had a negative view of the platform.

“While Facebook is still deeply integrated into the daily lives of teens, it is sometimes seen as a utility and an obligation rather than an exciting new platform for teens to claim as their own,” the report says. from Pew in 2013. In this nine-year study, Pew found that teens expressed more enthusiasm for other platforms, even though they didn't use them as much as Facebook. This trend has remained constant: as new generations of teenagers join social media, they have almost completely abandoned Facebook.

Pew's new findings are also consistent with Facebook's own internal reports, according to documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen. A Facebook researcher found in early 2021 that teen users of the Facebook app had declined by 13% since 2019 and predicted that figure would continue to fall by 45% over the next two years. Overall, Facebook usage has remained somewhat flat, but this drop in a key demographic is bad news for Facebook's advertising business, which accounts for the bulk of its revenue.

"Most young adults perceive Facebook as a place for people in their 40s and 50s," says the 2021 internal Facebook document obtained by The Verge. "Young adults perceive content as boring, misleading and negative."

Even though teenagers are tired of Facebook, they haven't given up on Instagram, another Meta platform. Sixty-two percent of teens use Instagram, up from 52% in the 2014-2015 survey. But TikTok, which hadn't even been released at the time of the last study, is now used by 67% of American teenagers. Ninety-five percent of teens say they use YouTube, which might make it seem like the dominant social platform, but many users interact with the platform just to watch videos, rather than as a place to connect with others online. For example, a teenager who uses YouTube to listen to music would be included in that 95%.