(San Francisco) Revelation after revelation, Facebook’s little secrets 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.
On Monday, the world’s number 2 online advertising company is due to publish its quarterly results. Analysts expect revenue to be close to $ 30 billion, which would be a 38% year-over-year increase.
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 market authority, by Frances Haugen, a whistleblower and former engineer of the group Californian.
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 on 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.
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,” the newspaper reports, 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.
Bad ad
This weekend, 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.
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 Monday’s investor conference call, following the release of financial results, boss Mark Zuckerberg and other executives will be expected on these topics, but also on other economic challenges facing the company’s platforms.
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.