Being as upfront with you as I can, Facebook sucks in stereo. The only reason I have an account anymore is because I need it for the job that I do. That being said, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg got his just desserts this week as news came out that Facebook was losing regular users to the tune of “500,000 fewer daily log-ins.”
All of that resulted in declining profits for Facebook’s relatively new parent company, Meta.
According to the Daily Mail:
- Facebook reported a nearly half million drop in daily users during the last three months of 2021, with only 1.93 billion users logging in each day
- Facebook's parent company, Meta, saw its stock plunge 22.6% during after-hours trading on Wednesday
- If the drop holds until the market opens Thursday, the company's market capitalization - its overall value - is on track to drop by nearly $200 billion
- Zuckerberg personally experienced a more than $29 billion loss when the company's stock fell Wednesday
And while Meta not only has Facebook under its umbrella but also Instagram and WhatsApp, Zuckerberg sees viral apps like TikTok directly contributing to the downturn in Facebook users.
“People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time, and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly,” Zuckerberg said before talking about why a mission of Meta is to develop their own “short-form video product, Reels. “And this is why our focus on Reels is so important over the long term.”
Another theory on the downturn of the most successful social media platform of all time is that Facebook seems to quickly be having the same problem that the establishment corporate media are currently experiencing — no one trusts them anymore.
The rampant data harvesting done by apps like Facebook has raised concerns about people’s private security over their information. Unfortunately, it’s a little too late on that boat for most social media users, as practically no one has the time to read their long, convoluted terms of service before agreeing to sign up.
Sadly, most people’s private information has already been compromised. But it seems as though some people have had enough of it. Then again, TikTok isn’t exactly the safest platform to use either.
It's looking so bad for Facebook that the hashtag #DeleteFacebook has been trending on Twitter throughout Thursday.