The largest social network in the world is losing the essence of what it means to be a social network: its members. Facebook loses users at a constant and rapid rate; And what’s more, the horizon looming behind Zuckerberg’s universe appears to have health benefits… at least initially.
Since 2017, Facebook has been on a constant downward trend. What has prompted your members to decide to leave, with increasing frequency? Several recent events, such as the crisis over the treatment of privacy, the sale of data, personalized advertising … combined with a major rejection campaign (visible in movements such as #LeaveFacebook) has caused the most popular social network in the world to be on frank decline. Of course, users do not stop using the networks, but instead move to other more popular ones, mainly Instagram (and Twitter, which remains despite the inclement weather).
How many people leave Facebook every day?
It is difficult to establish an exact figure, especially since user behavior is unpredictable: that is, we cannot know if a person has completely stopped using Facebook even if they have not left the platform, or at what level they continue to use it.
As explained in this Nobbot article, a 2018 report from Pew Research estimated that 42% of US users had stopped consulting the platform on a regular basis; 54% had conscientiously consulted privacy data; and 26% had deleted the app from their mobiles.
Other reports are even more pessimistic. Inc. magazine believes there have been some 15 million departures since 2017. And this could be just the beginning of an even bigger drop.
Although it sounds superficial, social networks have become a very important dimension in the lives of millions of people and Facebook has 2 billion users worldwide. Faced with the chain of abandonments, some researchers have wondered the consequences for mental health that may have to stop using a social network that, until now, was an element of daily use.
Will we be able to live without Facebook?
The universities of Standford and New York have proposed to find out what is the behavior of people who leave Facebook, and to check both their behavior pattern and their reactions after they stop using the social network. To do this, they paid an amount of about 100 euros to 2,488 people, active Facebook users, to deactivate their accounts and study their subsequent reactions, including their withdrawal syndrome.
The conclusion of the study is that users showed an improvement in well-being in the 30 days after leaving their Facebook accounts: “Four weeks without Facebook improves well-being and reduces demand once the experiment is over. This suggests that factors such as addiction may influence people to use Facebook more than they would like, ”the researchers conclude.
Attention: we cannot establish a direct relationship between mental health and Facebook abandonment , since this result may be due to the fact that there was an economic reward for the study subjects (observational); and, on the other hand, this positive effect could occur with the abandonment of any social network, and not just Facebook.
Another consequence of the abandonment of Facebook has to do with information: heavy users of social networks use them as the main source of information. As Pew Research reveals, 42% of American adults inform themselves through Facebook. Therefore, it is logical to think that a person who leaves this social network becomes less informed, but not necessarily worse informed : “Although deactivation makes people less informed, it also makes them less polarized.”
If leaving Facebook seems to increase our well-being and prevent us from becoming contaminated with polarized information, will this be the end of this social network? In March 2019 Facebook issued a statement in which it promised a series of improvements for the user; At the moment, there is no data available that the trend has been corrected.
