3 billion people use Facebook. Most of them are elderly

As per Facebook, it is still alive. Additionally, Facebook wants you to know that it is not solely for “old people,” as young people have been claiming for years.

Now that TikTok, its most significant enemy, is under closer government inspection due to rising tensions between the U.S. and China, Facebook may be able to pitch itself as a competitive local alternative.

There is only one issue: teenagers like Devin Walsh have grown up and gone on.

“I can’t even recall when I last logged in. According to Walsh, 24, a Manhattan resident and public relations professional, it must have been a long time ago.

Instead, she visits Instagram, a platform owned by Facebook parent firm Meta, five or six times daily.

Additionally, she spends roughly an hour daily scrolling through TikTok, letting the algorithm discover stuff “I didn’t even know I was interested in.”

Walsh cannot picture a scenario in which her use of Facebook, which she joined in sixth grade, returns daily.

The branding, correct? Walsh used the Gen Z phrase for things that are not acceptable when he said, “When I think of Facebook, I think ugh, like cheugy, older people, like parents posting pictures of their kids, random status updates, and also people fighting about political issues.”

The social media platform that was once popular and was created before the iPhone is getting close to 20 years old. While Facebook has partly faded into the background over time, it has been inevitably baked into daily existence for those who came of age around the time Mark Zuckerberg established thefacebook.com from his Harvard dorm room in 2004.

Facebook is up against a peculiar problem. It is now checked by 3 billion people each month. That makes up more than one-third of everyone on the planet. And 2 billion users sign in each day.

After twenty years, it is still engaged in a struggle for relevance and its future.

It is unquestionably not the place to be for younger generations—those who joined in middle school or are currently in middle school.

Without this influential group, Facebook, which is still the primary source of income for parent firm Meta, runs the risk of becoming dull and merely functional, like email.

This wasn’t always the case. Facebook was the place to be, a cultural touchstone, a topic of a Hollywood film, and was frequently brought up in conversation and on late-night television for almost ten years.

Rival MySpace, which had just recently begun, swiftly lost relevance as young people rushed to Facebook. MySpace being acquired by stodgy old News Corp. in 2005 didn’t help its situation.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Tom Alison, the CEO of Facebook (Zuckerberg’s title is now Meta CEO), seemed upbeat about the platform’s strategies for luring in young adults.

“We used to have a team at Facebook that was focused on the younger cohorts, or maybe there were one or two projects that were dedicated to coming up with new ideas,” Alison added. “And about two years ago, we said no—our entire product line needs to change, evolve, and adapt to the needs of the young adults.”

He refers to this period as one of “social discovery.”