Data from from the Pew Research Center illustrate this. Across all Internet users, Facebook is, by a wide margin, the most popular social networking platform; it attracts over one billion hits a day. However, older users favor Facebook by a wider margin than younger users: 61.9 percent of Facebook users are now over the age of 25.
In addition, recent research from investment bank Piper Jaffray and from Daniel Miller, a researcher at University College London, has shown that young teenagers are abandoning Facebook in large numbers. As parents and grandparents have moved onto Facebook, teens and young people have begun to move off, transferring their social media activities to Instagram and Snapchat.
As a result of this migration, Facebook news feeds have changed; instead of pictures of parties, there are pictures of babies. Instead of sharing high school gossip, users are sharing the latest on the Trump presidential bid.
Facebook Reads the News
As demographic shifts among Facebook users have taken root, the company has begun to focus on areas that are of greater interest to more mature users—in particular: news.
Facebook has established itself as a key portal through which people access news. According to Pew, 30 percent of U.S. adults got news from Facebook, far exceeding the 8 percent who got news from Twitter and the 3 percent who got news from LinkedIn in 2014. (It’s still lower than the 87 percent of Americans who got their news from TV, and the 65 percent who got it from radio.)
We know from years of research by organizations like the American Press Institute that, across all news categories, older audiences are more interested in the news than younger ones. Facebook’s prominence as a news portal can be understood as a consequence of the growing number of older users.
Facebook users share what interests them. For older adults, that is often the news of the day, and Facebook has begun to embrace its role in the news business. The recently launched Instant Article function is an example of the company’s new focus on itself as a news source and portal.
So, Why the ‘Dislike’ Button?
Facebook is not what it was a decade ago. Instead of vulnerable teens, its user base largely comprises adults. And with the increased tendency of these users to share news, the ability to express something other than “liking” has become more pronounced. As Zuckerberg notes:
Not every moment is a good moment, right? And if you are sharing something that is sad … like the refugee crisis that touches you … it might not feel comfortable to Like that post.
The development of a “dislike” button—in whatever empathetic format Facebook eventually releases—can thus be seen as an acknowledgment that the site has changed. It’s become, in part, a forum in which grown adults discuss adult issues. A new form of expression is necessary to support this changed reality.
Felicity Duncan is an assistant professor of digital communication and social media at Cabrini College. This article was previously published on TheConversation.com
