Facebook may be fading, but it’s still the leading platform for older audiences and local news

Julia Angwin argues in The New York Times today that Facebook is dying. The first thought that comes to mind is “good riddance.” But even though the number of Facebook users is declining, I question her premise — though she concedes that the platform will be with us for many years to come, even as it fades into irrelevance.

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Angwin compares Facebook to AOL and Yahoo, two other services that persist essentially as zombie platforms. But AOL had no real uses after broadband internet came along, and Yahoo was eclipsed by Google, whose search engine was far superior. For that matter, Facebook displaced MySpace, a similar service that wasn’t nearly as good.

What will displace Facebook? None of the social-media platforms that have come along do the same thing. Twitter and its progeny, principally Threads (a Meta product, like Facebook) and Bluesky, are length-limited and don’t easily allow you to form groups, especially those that are private. Instagram (Meta again) is a photo platform that has been enshittified into uselessness. TikTok isn’t really a social platform; it’s more of a broadcast service that encourages users to sit back and be entertained.

I enjoyed this section of Angwin’s piece, although the praise for TikTok sounds a discordant note:

There is a grim satisfaction in watching this organization [Meta] hoist with its own petard. This is the company that profited from trafficking in lies, that tuned its algorithms to boost hatred and division, that stole our data and used it against us, that created the culture of toxic memes that are now central to our degraded public discourse. The fall of Facebook could even be a sign of a heartening turn in our national conversation: TikTok traffics more in inspirational content — prom videos are currently trending — than in the divisive narratives Facebook fostered.

I was going to write that Facebook has faded away for anyone under 50. In fact, 62% of Facebook users are between 18 and 44, with the largest chunk, 24%, coming in at 25 to 34, according to Statista. Even so, another 24% are 55 and older.

News organizations, especially at the local level, need to be on Facebook. The local news audience skews older, too, and it’s just not using any of these other services to a significant degree. The problem is that Mark Zuckerberg has built an evil money machine. A local-news outlet can start a group or a page and ask users to “like” it, but in order for that outlet’s content to show up reliably in users’ feeds, it has to pay. And that’s not something a cash-strapped start-up is in a position to do.

By the way, in 2019 I wrote a piece for Nieman Lab about The016, a Worcester-based social-media platform designed by veteran journalist Mark Henderson to give news outlets in that area an alternative to Facebook’s algorithmic-driven content. And The016 is thriving. Still, I’m not aware of similar platforms elsewhere.

Angwin makes some good points in her piece, but Facebook isn’t going to fade away to any significant degree until something comes along that does more or less the same thing, is perceived as better, and starts attracting large numbers of users. I don’t see that happening anytime soon.