Facebook says, 'How do you do, fellow kids?'
As Meta tries to rekindle the flame between Facebook and socially anxious youths, the company released a blog post Wednesday titled, "Navigating your 20s with Facebook."
Back in my day, Facebook was cool. Gaggles of middle schoolers trolled the local mall, where we would stop into the Apple Store, find an early MacBook Pro, and take dozens of pictures with gaudy Photo Booth filters to post on Facebook. Sometimes, other teens would forget to log out of their accounts, and we would post something like “i just pooped” before signing into our own accounts.
This isn’t the case anymore. In 2014, the Pew Research Center estimated that 71% of U.S. teens used Facebook; as of 2022, that percentage dropped to 32%, then slightly increased to 33% last year. Other studies from Edison Research have shown the same trend. Though Meta is reticent to share much demographic information about its user base, the app’s head, Tom Alison, said that there are 40 million daily active users in the U.S. and Canada between the ages of 18 and 29.
Facebook remained central to my social experiences in high school and college. If you weren’t on Facebook, you wouldn’t get invited to parties, and you wouldn’t know when any student clubs were holding meetings. In the 2010s, deleting Facebook would have been a disaster for my social life. Now if I woke up one day to find that my Facebook account had been deleted, it would be a minor inconvenience.
My experience isn’t unique. So, as Meta tries to rekindle the flame between Facebook and socially anxious youths, the company released a blog post Wednesday titled, “Navigating your 20s with Facebook.”
“Your twenties are a decade full of transitions, from graduating college, moving to new cities, starting new jobs and living on your own for the first time. It can be a hectic (and fun) decade, and Facebook is here to help,” the post says.
Do twentysomethings read the Facebook blog? (Does anyone other than journalists read the Facebook blog?) If they do, they’ll learn that you can meet new friends in groups like “NYC Brunch Squad” or “People We Meet in Book Club,” a virtual book club with almost 20,000 members. (It’s not necessarily a group for meeting fellow readers, but rather, the title is probably referencing a novel by best-selling romance writer Emily Henry.)
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