Teenage Exodus

Facebook trying to reinvent itself as the Metaverse can be seen as a rebranding effort after one too many scandals but the development also ties in with another crucial problem - one the social media network has been accused of keeping from its shareholders: The exodus of teenagers and young adults from the platform.

Internal documents leaked by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen basically show the same as two surveys nine years apart recently published by Business Insider. While in the heyday of Facebook in the early 2010s basically every teenager was using Facebook, the numbers look quite different today. In a recent survey by Piper Sandler, only 27 percent of teenagers said they were active users of the platform.

Most teenage Facebook users of the 2010s probably didn't delete their accounts, but simply aged out of the cohort, while new generations of teenagers soon branded Facebook an old-people network. Increased competition in the social media sphere in the past decade meant that young users soon flocked to newer providers to open their first social media accounts, be it on Snapchat, TikTok or Instagram. At least with the latter network, Facebook parent company Meta is still getting its share after having acquired the social media company in 2012.