Facebook Is On Its DEATHBED After Millions FLEE And A Wave Of Scandals
Facebook Is On Its DEATHBED After Millions FLEE And A Wave Of Scandals. It was recently reported that the social media giant lost 15 million users in the past few years, but most of these users are young people. This paints a terrible trend for the platform that is rapidly trying to transform itself into a privacy focused network.But amid this crisis they are being criminally investigated by Federal prosecutors, losing two of their top executives, and being hit by a massive global network outage.Mark Zuckerberg's plans seem to be failing and his actions only seem to be making the demise of Facebook happen sooner. While this is bad news all around it seems Facebook is still growing users on Instagram which may be its saving grace. All of this news comes as we also are learning that Twitters user base is shrinking as well. Could this be the end of the Social Media Giants?
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Facebook is facing a full-blown crisis after several stories have dropped showing this may be the beginning of the end for the company.
It was recently reported that the platform lost 15 million users in the past couple years.
And while that's not a whole lot compared to its total user base, it's mostly millennials.
Young people don't find the platform valuable anymore and are leaving.
We're now learning that several deals Facebook made are being criminally investigated and a grand jury has subpoenaed some of the companies that are working with Facebook.
And on top of that, two of Facebook's top executives have just left the company.
Mark Zuckerberg is desperately trying to restructure the product they offer to make it more valuable, but it would seem like it's not working.
Today, let's take a look at the various news stories that show Facebook may be on the way out.
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Our first story from just last week.
Facebook is rapidly losing millennials.
U.S.
user base down 15 million since 2017.
Older users are taking up a larger percentage of the platform than ever before.
According to a recent study by Edison Research, Facebook is hemorrhaging users in the U.S., losing about 15 million people since 2017.
The largest drop is among teen users and millennials.
As of February 2019, 62% of 12 to 34 year olds in the U.S.
log into Facebook.
This is down from 79% in 2017, and represents about 11 million of the overall decrease.
The 35-54 age group has also seen a 3% decline over the last two years, with 69% of people using Facebook now versus 72 in 2017.
While the U.S.
population on Facebook continues to shrink, Facebook is reporting overall growth globally.
This news helps quantify a report from February 2018 that showed Facebook was losing younger users to newer, hipper platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram.
Interestingly, or perhaps strategically, the majority of the users leaving Facebook in 2019 are going to Instagram, which is a Facebook-owned entity.
The decline in the millennial segments may be a result of younger folks being more tech-savvy and aware of the consequences of Facebook's data and privacy policies.
Now here's why this is important.
In the coming years, young people will start, obviously, getting older.
And if they're not on the platform, and people younger than the current youngest generation don't get on the platform, then the trend is clear.
Going into the future, people will not be using Facebook.
It's going to be an old tool, kind of like AOL was.
At a certain point, young people stopped using AOL to log onto the internet, And just got cable and we're permanently on the internet and that's where we are now.
Back in the day when I was growing up, you had to sign in to AOL to connect to the internet.
It seems like Facebook is going this route.
As young people use it less, 10 or 15 years go by, there's going to be substantially less people on the platform.
But the first story mentions how younger people may be aware of the privacy issues when using Facebook, and maybe that's why they're leaving.
Amid this, Mark Zuckerberg is looking at a new privacy-focused vision.
However, this story from the Daily Mail, Facebook loses two top execs as CPO Chris Cox and WhatsApp VP Chris Daniels step down on the same day, a week after Mark Zuckerberg unveiled new privacy-focused vision.
A source familiar with the situation, Told BuzzFeed News that Cox's departure may have been tied to a disagreement over Zuckerberg's new privacy-focused strategy for Facebook.
The firm is also losing WhatsApp Vice President Chris Daniels.
Zuckerberg, who announced the departures in a blog post on Thursday, explained that the moves come as Facebook has settled on a strategy for the future of its family of apps, centered around enabling encryption and interoperability between the apps.
It isn't entirely clear why they're losing these executives, but these string of stories spell bad news.
Many people feel that Mark Zuckerberg is trying to shift into privacy-focused apps because he's losing young people.
Young people like Snapchat.
Snapchat is where you post a message and then it's gone later.
And perhaps this is why young people don't want to be on Facebook.
They know they can get in trouble later.
There are tons of stories of people digging up old posts and getting people in trouble for it, so young people are probably looking for something more privacy or encryption focused.
Mark Zuckerberg is chasing after this, and in response, we're hearing many people are leaving the company.
And while those stories paint a negative trend for Facebook's future, it gets worse.
The New York Times reported just a few days ago, Facebook's data deals are under criminal investigation.
Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into data deals Facebook struck with some of the world's largest technology companies, intensifying scrutiny of the social media giant's business practices as it seeks to rebound from a year of scandal and setbacks.
A grand jury in New York has subpoenaed records from at least two prominent makers of smartphones and other devices, according to two people who were familiar with the requests and who insisted on anonymity to discuss confidential legal matters.
Both companies had entered into partnerships with Facebook, gaining broad access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of its users.
The companies were among more than 150, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Sony, that had cut sharing deals with the world's dominant social media platform.
The agreements previously reported in the New York Times let the company see users' friends, contact information, and other data, sometimes without consent.
We're cooperating with investigators and take those probes seriously, a Facebook spokesman said in a statement.
We've provided public testimony, answered questions, and pledged that we will continue to do so.
It is not clear when the grand jury inquiry overseen by prosecutors with the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York began, or exactly what it is focusing on.
Facebook was already facing scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
And the Justice Department's Securities Fraud Unit began investigating after reports that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, had improperly obtained the Facebook data of 87 million people and used it to build tools that helped President Trump's election campaign.
The Justice Department and the Eastern District declined to comment for the article.
Aside from the criminal investigation, the scrutiny from federal regulators, the loss of executives, and the bleeding of users, there are some other reasons why many people probably don't want to be on the platform.
It was recently announced that Facebook was going to derank certain content and that they had inadvertently given access to your private messages to major tech giants.
This story from the New York Post in December.
Facebook reportedly gave tech giants access to users' private messages.
Facebook gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read users' private messages.
They allowed Microsoft search engine Bing to see the names of Facebook users' friends without permission, and they let Amazon find users' names and contact information through their friends on the platform, according to the report.
In a statement to The Post, a Netflix spokesperson said, at no time did we access people's private messages on Facebook or ask for the ability to do so.
The Times report raises concerns about Facebook's 2011 agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, which states the company cannot share user data without explicit permission.
This is just giving third parties permission to harvest data without you being informed of it or giving consent to it, David Vladeck, who ran the FTC's Consumer Protection Bureau, told the Times.
I don't understand how this unconsented-to data harvesting can at all be justified under the consent decree.
And this is one of the stories alluded to in the New York Times, but I wanted to make sure I clarified, it wasn't just access to your friends' information or your contact information, but literally the private messages you sent to people.
And as Netflix pointed out, they didn't even ask for it!
Without even asking for this information, Facebook was giving it away.
And it wasn't that long ago that Facebook deranked brand pages on Facebook so that you would see more posts from your friends and family.
But this led to a significant traffic decrease for many news outlets and a loss of revenue.
Meaning, Facebook has not only become scary for the average user because they're giving away your information, but major brands are using it less because Facebook has stripped them of their ability to reach an audience.
Facebook is just becoming less and less useful for everybody.
And there's still more news.
It's not just these stories.
There was a massive Facebook and Instagram outage just the other day.
This from Sky News.
Facebook and Instagram back up after massive global outage.
Users across the globe are venting their frustration at the outages, which hit Facebook services since Thursday evening.
Users across the world, including the US, Japan, New Zealand, and parts of Europe, were affected by the outage and faced difficulties accessing the social network giant and its app, WhatsApp, and Instagram for several hours.
In a statement to Sky News on Thursday evening, a Facebook spokesperson said,
Yesterday we made a server configuration change that triggered a cascading series of issues.
As a result, many people had difficulty accessing our apps and services.
We have resolved the issues and our systems have been recovering over the last few hours.
We are very sorry for the inconvenience and we appreciate everyone's patience.
Now, the reason I feel that story is important in this context is not only are people getting
frustrated with crappy service, but it seems like they made server changes
following Mark Zuckerberg's new vision.
After a wave of controversy, privacy issues, scandal after scandal after scandal, they started bleeding users.
Mark Zuckerberg announced he wants a new privacy-focused series of apps.
They make some server changes, and it just screwed everything up.
I'd have to imagine many people just outright abandoned the platforms as soon as the outage happened because it's just too burdensome to deal with.
Although, I'm sure most people are still using the apps.
They are bleeding users, and I'm sure this only made things worse.
In a story from the 7th from Recode, they say, This could be the beginning of the end for Facebook's social network.
So it's not just my opinion, many people feel this way.
Facebook is pushing more deeply into private encrypted communication.
What does that mean for your news feed?
Unfortunately, all of this news to me seems too little too late.
People wanted these functions when Snapchat came out.
For those that aren't familiar, with Snapchat, you can share messages, post photos and videos, and they eventually disappear.
People wanted that feature, Facebook didn't offer it, and now it's several years later and they're talking about privacy.
You've already lost 15 plus million users.
You're already bleeding millennials.
I don't think anything you can do will save you from the problems that you didn't see.
And I don't blame Facebook.
They couldn't recognize us.
They're a massive company.
The changes were happening, and they couldn't move quickly enough.
But now, where are we at?
Facebook losing users, they lost two of their top execs, they're under criminal investigation, and they keep getting pulled into these scandals around leaking people's private information.
The negative press can't be good for the platform, and unfortunately I don't think this is going to solve the problem.
They're too late.
Admittedly, they are gaining users for Instagram, which they own, and WhatsApp as well as Messenger are still useful.
I gotta say, it's been years since I've actually used Facebook the way a regular person would, mostly because too many people have added me and I just don't really communicate with very many people anymore.
I kinda just use Messenger.
And I think Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook can see that, but all this really means?
Facebook, as we know it, is probably already dead.
And again, not just my opinion, but many people are talking about it.
Is this a good thing?
I mean, honestly, I don't know because I don't really use Facebook anymore, but let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
How do you feel about this news?
Is it good that people are finally moving away from Facebook?
It's now mostly a 30-year-old and up platform, as young people flee and want more privacy and more intimate messaging.
Mark Zuckerberg sees that, he's chasing it.
Is that a good thing, and do you think he'll be able to recapture those people he lost on other platforms?
Because like I said, Instagram is growing.
Comment below, we'll keep the conversation going.
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