Facebook is a dying social media amongst teens, throughout the past year less and less teenagers have been using Facebook. This is not because teenagers have been interacting with society more, or have been studying harder.
The only reason is because they have found better outlets for their social media needs. Some of these outlets include Instagram, Twitter, Kik messaging and Snapchat.
Facebook has been overrun with users, there are currently well over one billion active accounts,
not even considering the memorialized accounts of the deceased. When a Facebook user passes away, a loved one can memorialize that account, nothing can be posted or changed on that account, it is frozen until the account is deleted. There are an estimated 30 million deceased Facebook users.
Over 100 million accounts are dedicated to animals or objects.
Some accounts are created for people who don’t even exist. Sometimes people create fake accounts with fake names and other information. Groups can create accounts to publicly announce certain messages or ideas.
Another reason that teens have stopped using Facebook is because parents are constantly monitoring what their kids say.
Students don’t want to have to censor what they want to say, or have their parents read everything they post online. Students want their digital freedoms, which is why they resort to other social medias less populated by their parents.
On top of parents and the substantial amount of users, Facebook has gotten much more complicated through the years. With all of the new and improved updates, it is hard to keep up with the extra settings and complicated features.
Senior Chloe Bowman said, “Facebook used to be a lot more fun, like when there weren’t so many ads and so many parents trying to add me as a friend.”
Even though the amount of teenage users surmounts most other demographics, and has been rapidly declining, their stock market has managed to increase nearly 80% since May of this year.
Another reason teens have stopped using Facebook is because this generation of teenagers are a mobile generation and rely on their mobile devices for their social outlets. “The Facebook app is too slow,” senior Blake Nicolas said. “In the time it takes me to post one thing, I can upload two pictures on instagram.”
Facebook is making large strides to create a more hospitable mobile app, and have been successful in improving the overall quality. They are trying to become more similar to apps like Twitter and Instagram, which are much more simple and easier to maneuver.
Facebook announced that they had over 1 billion accounts, then eMarketer, a digital media research group, uncovered the truth. Facebook only has 889.3 million human users. They also found out that users have reported that over 10% of the other accounts are actually not real people, or spam accounts. Facebook is overpopulated with fake and spam accounts that are always trying to friend and poke other people.
Facebook announced that they were aware of this issue, and that many of their statistics may be inaccurate.