Millions of young people are leaving social media, and here are three reasons why

The digital media students sat at their desks waiting for class to start while playing with their phones, but they weren't checking Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest or Twitter.

Instead, they’re checking Snapchat’s Stories to catch up on the day’s news, chatting on Facebook Messenger, or checking in on friends in group chats. If time permits, they might turn to Instagram to see what their favorite brands have posted, or log on to Twitter to see what celebrities have posted to make them laugh. But most of the time, they stay away from public social media and choose to interact more privately with friends.

The exodus from social media

For several years, there have been alarm bells about the decline in teen use of Facebook. In 2013, an article was written about why teens were starting to get tired of Facebook. And Time magazine said that more than 11 million teens had left Facebook since 2011. But many of these articles speculated that the teens who left Facebook were moving to Instagram, Facebook's photo-sharing app, or other social media. In other words, they believed that teens were leaving Facebook, not social media.

Now, however, new data is making it increasingly clear that teens are fleeing social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter in droves for more niche tools like Messenger or Snapchat, where they share more intimate information, like silly selfies and complaints about class, with close friends, rather than posting broad messages for everyone to see.

For example, in a research report released last August, the Pew Research Center pointed out that 49% of smartphone users aged 18-29 are using communication applications such as Kik, Whatsapp or iMessage; 41% of smartphone users in this age group are using applications that can automatically delete sent messages, such as Snapchat. According to another Pew research data, among smartphone users in this age group, only 37% use Pinterest, 22% use LinkedIn, and 32% use Twitter. Niche communication applications clearly beat more popular social media.

Among people aged 18-29, 82% said they use Facebook. However, these people all gave a positive answer to the question "Do you access Facebook through the Internet or mobile applications?" Having a Facebook account and posting on Facebook are two different things. Although Pew has statistics showing how often people use Facebook (70% of people say they go on it at least once a day), these data are not broken down by age. According to the author's analysis of students' class discussions and homework completion, many teenage users log in to Facebook just to see what others have posted, rather than to create their own content. Their photos, dynamic information, likes and other information are more left in closed gardens, such as group chat tools and Snapchat.

Why they left

There is no public research data on this phenomenon. However, based on the author's discussion with about 80 American college students, there are probably three reasons why young users prefer Snapchat over Facebook:

1. “My grandma loves to like the photos I post.”

As Facebook becomes more and more integrated into our lives, its user base has also changed profoundly. According to Pew statistics, 48% of Internet users over the age of 65 use Facebook. As social media gradually attracts the attention of older users, their appeal to teenagers is gradually waning. Because college students don’t want their parents to see the photos they posted of their Friday night party.

2. The contradiction between permanent and temporary information.

Many students I’ve spoken to avoid posting on sites like Facebook because, as one college student put it, “these pictures stay there forever!” Having grown up with social media, college students are aware that anything they post on Facebook never really disappears, and so they are becoming more wary of this. For teens to maintain their online presence, they need to manage what they post in cyberspace, and that management becomes increasingly complex on social media. For many college students, platforms like Snapchat, which promise to immediately delete user posts, give them a break from worrying about their online presence.

3. Due to the needs of work and personal life.

Teens are increasingly aware that future employers, college admissions departments and banks will use people's social media pages to evaluate them. As a result, many of them have begun using social media more strategically. For example, many students create multiple personal pages on Twitter under different names. They carefully manage the information they post on their public personal pages on Facebook or LinkedIn; leaving truly private information to other platforms.

Is this a problem?

We may see a new revolution in the digital media industry. Just as teenagers were the first to flock to Facebook and Twitter, they may now be the first to leave these social platforms and rush to something new.

The migration of teenagers from mass social media to niche communication apps could have far-reaching implications for social media companies and society as a whole.

From the perspective of businesses, this change will bring them a lot of trouble. If teenagers are no longer willing to submit their personal private information to social networking sites, the digital advertising system that relies on this user data may fail.

For example, if teens stop clicking “likes” on Facebook, the platform’s long-term value to advertisers will be diminished. Currently, Facebook uses the information it collects about users’ “likes” and “shares” to provide targeted advertising. So, if you click “like” on Save Animals, you might see an ad on Facebook for the animal rescue charity PetSmart. This kind of precisely targeted advertising is what makes Facebook a formidable advertising platform. If teens stop feeding Facebook’s algorithms with “likes,” its advertising revenue will be at risk.

From the perspective of parents and older social media users, this change is also worrying. Some parents are used to monitoring their children's online activities, and now they may find themselves increasingly excluded from their children's world. But on the other hand, for adult users who use these social media platforms to contact colleagues, exchange information and news, and build personal networks, they may not notice such changes. In fact, many older users have never understood why teenagers are keen on airing their dirty laundry on social media. For them, this change now seems to mean that teenage users are beginning to mature.

From a social or academic perspective, this change is both encouraging and worrying.

As more political activity moves online, social media is playing a major role in more and more major social events. The loss of teen users means they will pay less attention to the social justice issues and political views that are hotly debated on social platforms. If college students spend most of their time in group chats or using Snapchat, there is a lower probability that new ideas will enter social networks. But on the other hand, a new study finds that our use of social media to read news may cause us to always pay attention to narrow and partisan news. If teens reduce their use of mass social media, they may be less exposed to these narrow news and ideas.

The great potential of social media is that it has the potential to create powerful, public platforms for ideas to spread and political movements to grow. If teenagers are indeed moving away from these platforms and spending most of their time on apps that allow them to communicate with their friends, then the political potential of social media may never be realized.

From: BI Chinese website