SAN FRANCISCO ― Could Facebook be regaining popularity? Shunned by the younger generation since the advent of TikTok, favourability towards Facebook has reportedly recovered since the platform opted to reduce political content, according to a US report.
The number of users has not increased significantly, but the social network’s strategy of de-emphasizing news could have had a positive impact on the way it is perceived by users.
Now in its twentieth year ― due to be celebrated in 2024 ― Facebook is considered an older social network that can seem somewhat dated and unattractive to generations Z and Y, who tend to prefer TikTok, particularly since the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown.
By the end of 2021, Facebook had even lost users for the first time in its history: the number of people logging on every day worldwide had fallen by 4 million in the last quarter of the year.
Despite various controversies, with multiple scandals over the platform’s two decades of existence, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network seems to have managed to turn things around among social media users.
At least, so suggests research carried out by Morning Consult, which examined Americans’ favourability towards Facebook.
According to Morning Consult Brand Intelligence, the platform has won back the favour of American users by reducing the presence of news articles on the site.
According to a report by Similarweb and Axios, referral traffic from Facebook to news sites has fallen by 80 per cent since September 2020.
Since the implementation of this new strategy, the platform’s net favourability rating (which measures the share of respondents who said they had a favourable impression of Facebook minus the share of those who did not) has increased since 2021.
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