La désertion des jeunes de Facebook : le début de la fin pour le géant des réseaux sociaux ?

“When I visit schools, Facebook is old news!” says Emmanuelle Parent, director and co-founder of the Center for Emotional Intelligence Online (CIEL).

“Today, young people are on TikTok, Instagram, spaces created for them that resemble them.” And that’s the consolation prize for Meta, Facebook’s owner, since Instagram also belongs to them.

The DGTL Study, conducted among 3046 Canadians between September 5 and October 4 and published on December 7, confirms this, detailing the exodus of young people.

According to André Caron, emeritus professor at the Université de Montréal and specialist in information and communication technologies, this migration of young people “has created a shock at Facebook. They had to redefine themselves because parents, then grandparents, have reappropriated it. The generation that was there at 20 when it was launched, these people are now 40, 45. And families, those with children, want to keep in touch and are now Facebook’s most faithful users.”

“It’s not like it’s going to disappear tomorrow,” says Maude Bonenfant, a professor in the Department of Social and Public Communication at UQAM and an expert in social networks. Indeed, the platform still has over three billion subscribers. “The platform remains, even if the practices of certain age groups are evolving. Young people are not necessarily on the Facebook platform, but they can use the chat, for example.”

Facebook: a new place for contact

Facebook’s explosion after its launch in 2004 can be attributed to the fact that it was the right vehicle at the right time. “At first, the web was so complex, hard to master. The first thing Facebook did was to simplify a lot, a lot of what we need to do to share something on the internet,” recalls Philippe Beaudoin, a researcher in artificial intelligence and founder of the new Waverly platform, which is still in development.

Also, the platform allowed something new and extremely attractive: it allowed commenting and commenting on comments, opening up debate and discussion. “When we’re human, we often talk about our needs—eating, sleeping, moving—but we also need social belonging. Facebook really answered that need. It could have been another platform, but they succeeded,” says Emmanuelle Parent.

According to Pierre Trudel, a professor of law at the Université de Montréal and an expert in media and telecommunications law, Facebook “provided a sort of universal platform in which each individual can very easily disseminate, communicate, share, interact with several people or with a single individual, and especially to disseminate on a global scale. Before the advent of Facebook, it was theoretically possible, but much less accessible.”

A giant imposing its business model

But as Pierre Trudel adds, the platform’s arrival and explosive growth “marked a considerable change in the media landscape, namely a radical shift in the ability to monetize the attention of internet users. Facebook is a social network that funds its activities and generates profits by using, and then capturing, the data generated by individuals.”

“We have moved from a mass media universe to a universe dominated by social networks, online companies that function essentially according to a logic where it is simply a matter of calculating what attracts attention and selling it to the advertising market, unlike the media, which have as their primary mission to generate validated content,” he says.

“Facebook was quite lucky to be the first out of the gate and to take a certain lead over the others,” notes André Caron.

Maude Bonenfant agrees. “Once it imposes this economic model and makes a lot of money, it was able to impose itself throughout the ecosystem.” Then, she says, with the spread of smartphones and other tablets, “it became increasingly easy and user-friendly to use this kind of platform. It adapted to our practices, but above all we adapted our practices to this kind of platform.”

Nuisance or Benefit?

It is not uncommon to hear commentators accuse Facebook—and other platforms—of all the evils, but Emmanuelle Parent believes that nuance must be exercised. “Facebook has greatly helped to allow relationships that would never have occurred face-to-face. And it’s been demonstrated that support groups on social networks are really good for well-being,” she notes, citing, for example, support groups for health matters or for people with atypical sexual identities.

On the other hand, “there is a very real risk. It is scientifically proven that being behind a screen reduces empathy because you don’t see the reaction of the person in front of you. And our communication is not complete; we don’t have access to non-verbal communication. We may read a message that is all in capital letters, has no emojis, and deduce that the person is upset. We can respond more aggressively and say things we would never say face-to-face, especially to strangers.”

Philippe Beaudoin also refers to the dark side of technology. “One of the main problems when we are so dependent on Facebook for our communication, our access to information, is that the algorithm’s functioning is super opaque, that it can change from day to day, based on commercial needs. The algorithm has a huge impact on us as citizens, as a society, on our ability to make our culture shine.”

Censorship of information in Canada

Canada discovered how Facebook placed its interests ahead of those of the community when Meta blocked all news sharing to avoid paying royalties to support news production.

However, as Jean-Hugues Roy, a professor at the École des médias de l’UQM and a specialist in media economics, points out, in the early days Facebook was desperately seeking to attract media to its pages.

Canada is not the only jurisdiction seeking to involve the platform in financing the media and, according to him, Meta has already begun to subtly disengage from news. “Everywhere else in the world, people linked to information say that their content is traveling much less well on Facebook. It seems that Meta is putting the lid on news content because they realize that it’s trouble and that, to sell advertisement, it’s better to have cute little cats jumping down the stairs than what happened at your city council yesterday.”

Maude Bonenfant is not hiding her concern about this. “If commercial advertising can influence our buying behavior, information can also influence our political ideas. So it can have a very big impact on democracy, the political system, ideas, ideology in general.”

Tightening the laws?

All the experts interviewed agree that governments must intervene in the face of this tactic.

“It is quite possible to imagine that the laws in Canada take Facebook and other social networks at their word,” says Pierre Trudel. “That is to say, ‘You tell us that your vocation is to allow everyone to share the information they find relevant; therefore, you cannot, arbitrarily, decide to withdraw certain information because you believe it is contrary to your commercial interests’.”

“In other words, it would be possible to have a law that prohibits a social network from censoring for reasons other than the general application of criminal laws against hate or racist propaganda or pornography or things like that,” he continues, arguing that with its dominant position in the market, Facebook has become the equivalent of a public service.

Jean-Hugues Roy agrees, believing that “the best solution would be to force Facebook to have information since Facebook is used by a quite appreciable proportion of the Canadian population.”

“If the population can’t even get informed, what’s going to happen? What are we going to become as a society?” asks Maude Bonenfant.

“Already, we are starting to see all the possible abuses of disinformation or misinformation. If there is no more information from recognized media, we, as a society, will have to act to restore this power.”

Rise of new networks?

Has Facebook become unassailable? Maude Bonenfant doesn’t think so. “Eventually, if there is an alternative that works well, that is easy to use, that meets the needs of citizens, I don’t see why it wouldn’t impose itself to replace a platform that, in the end, is harmful to citizens.”

This is what Philippe Beaudoin believes, whose future social network Waverly “aims to encourage users’ curiosity by allowing them to make richer connections with the people around them and with communities that are important to them to discover content that is richer, that is not just ‘clickbait’.”

“There is a kind of weariness with existing platforms as well, so in my opinion, we will see things emerging. Some will be more successful than others, for sure, but we will have a flourishing that we deserve in this universe.”