Facebook on Monday unveiled $ 9.2 billion in net profit in the third quarter, up 17% from a year ago, rare good news for the social media giant caught in one of its worst scandals reputation.
Revelation after revelation, the little secrets of the platform, which achieved a turnover of 29 billion dollars over the period, are exposed, painting the portrait of a Machiavellian giant who only convinces investors. But these could be more sensitive to the risk of erosion of young audiences.
So far, Facebook’s woes in the press have left them unmoved. For more than a month, American newspapers have been reporting articles based on the “Facebook papers”, thousands of internal documents submitted to the SEC, the stock exchange authority of the United States, by Frances Haugen, a whistleblower and former engineer of the Californian group.
As a common thread of controversy: the social media giant knew the problems – toxic content on Instagram for teenagers, disinformation on Facebook that harms democracy, etc. – but chose, in part, to ignore them, for the sake of preserving its profits.
Articles from Wall Street Journal, of New York Times or Washington post mainly relate to political or societal subjects.
But, Monday, the specialized site The Verge published a report showing that Facebook is concerned about declining interest among teens and young adults in its Western markets, a lucrative audience and critical to the firm’s revenue.
What reassure Wall Street, which looks above all if the platforms continue to attract the public, and therefore the advertisers.
Facebook holds 23.7% of the global digital advertising market in 2021, according to eMarketer, just behind its neighbor Google, number one in the sector with 28.6% of the pie.
The firm “is facing its worst deluge of negative press, and it will continue,” noted Debra Aho Williamson, an eMarketer analyst. But for now, her income “looks as good as expected,” she added.
Where are the young people?
“The number of teens using the Facebook application in the United States has fallen by 13% since 2019 and could plunge 45% over the next two years,” said the media, according to an internal memo. “Worse still, the younger the users, the less present they are on the app. “
During a presentation, always according to The Verge, employees estimated that teens spend 2-3 times more time on TikTok than on Instagram, and that they prefer Snapchat as a way of communicating with each other (rather than WhatsApp or Messenger, Facebook’s messengers).
Facebook does not publish these numbers in detail. According to its counters, as of June 30, the family of platforms was visited by 2.76 billion people every day, and 3.5 billion at least once a month.
The number of users of the social media giant has never decreased in recent years despite the scandals, since that of Cambridge Analytica (a British firm that had hijacked the personal information of tens of millions of Facebook users for the purposes of propaganda).
But the anger of the authorities and NGOs is growing.
At the end of the week, American dailies shone the spotlight on Facebook’s role in the polarization of societies. According to researchers employed by the firm, American and Indian users, with a priori moderate political views, are overexposed to extremist or conspiratorial content.
At issue: algorithms seeking to maximize the attention of consumers, an essential engine of the group’s growth.
To reassure
Faced with this new wave of criticism, Facebook is defending itself by recalling its substantial investments to clean up its platforms, fight against deceptive, hateful and problematic content and support the democratic process, including in languages other than English.
During the investor conference call on Monday, after the publication of the financial results, the boss, Mark Zuckerberg, and other executives will be expected on these topics, but also on other economic challenges facing the company’s platforms.
“The reality is that social networks are not the main culprits of these problems and cannot fix them on their own,” insisted Mark Zuckerberg.
He also tried to reassure investors about the group’s main financial concern at the moment: the latest update to the iPhone operating system, which gives users more control over their confidential data and makes it harder for social networks to measure efficiency.
Last Thursday, the group’s title lost nearly 5%… because of headwinds on the advertising side.
Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, had indeed published disappointing results because of the update of the iPhone operating system, which makes the tools for measuring the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns “inoperative”.
A problem that Facebook also suffers from, in addition to all this bad press.