Is there a future for Facebook?

Facebook gets in the news all the time, which isn’t surprising considering it has 2.2 billion active monthly users, give or take. A company that big is sure to become news, and Facebook does, whether it’s because of their recent major outage, their sudden decision to “ban” white separatist and white nationalist material or some other issue, it pops up a lot as a topic. What hasn’t changed, however, is that two questions have become persistent: Will Facebook survive? And, should it be allowed to?

The recent chart from Statista (up top) shows the percentages of various age groups using Facebook over the past three years. The overall trend has been for younger users to move away from Facebook even as the over 55s move toward it, which is what led Statista to cheekily ask, “Is Facebook Becoming Social Media's Retirement Home?” In the post accompanying the chart, Niall McCarthy acknowledged that, at the moment, “it’s a bit of a stretch” to call Facebook social media’s retirement home. He added:

There are several possible reasons as to why younger users are leaving Facebook in droves. …Facebook's privacy issues and breaches of trust have been cited as having an impact. The emergence of other platforms like Snapchat and Instagram are another key reason and both are highly attractive to younger generations due to their simplicity and the fact that they collect less private information. Facebook of course owns Instagram but that isn't helping it rectify the situation. It could well be that Facebook will have to roll out a universal messaging system to halt the user migration or else it might eventually have to accept that it's on the road to becoming social media's retirement home.

Facebook obviously knows all this—there’s very little about its users that it doesn’t know. This is probably what’s behind Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recently stated intention of turning Facebook into more of a privacy-focused messaging platform. In fact, Facebook already owns a secure messaging service, WhatsApp, which offers end-to-end encryption for users, something that means, theoretically, no one, including WhatsApp (currently run as a separate company) can see the contents of chats or listen in on phone calls made using the service (I say “theoretically” because there’s no such thing as a service that can’t be hacked, so there’s an at least theoretical possibility that someone, or some entity, might be able to intercept and decode messages—theoretically).

WhatsApp is in stark contrast to Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger, all of which harvest data to deliver targeted ads to users. Advertising is, in fact, one of the main ways Facebook makes money, often at the expense of traditional publishers, including those companies’ own Internet sites. So, if Facebook ends its ability to glean boatloads of personal information about individuals, and ads can’t be targeted to individuals with razor-sharp focus, how will it make money?

Obviously, we shouldn’t cry too hard for Facebook—they won’t do anything that will cost them their business. But as Associated Press writer Kelvin Chang pointed out, “Facebook’s vision of future? Looks like Chinese app WeChat”, a service that makes money mostly through commerce. It is different, though, since, being Chinese, encryption of private communication is forbidden.

Another possibility is that “This could be the beginning of the end for Facebook’s social network”, as recode put it in a recent piece by Kurt Wagner. He said:

Facebook’s core social network is primarily a place to post photos and videos and comments that aren’t private and don’t disappear. That’s not the future Facebook is building toward — and apparently not the future that users actually want.

Obviously, there are risks in this strategy, and not just for Facebook. A service using end-to-end encryption is the perfect choice for all sorts of really bad people, from drug dealers, to terrorists, to anyone engaged in any sort of criminal conspiracy. This concerns police operations, governments and their spy agencies, for obvious reasons, and they argue it shouldn’t be allowed.

But there’s another side to end-to-end encryption of communication: It can allow a parent to chat with their child who’s away at university without someone snooping on their every word, it can allow a suicidal person to chat completely confidentially with people who can help, and it can allow an abused spouse/partner/child to confidentially plan their escape without their abuser knowing what’s going on. It can make financial discussions—like with a bank and its customer—possible. And even on a basic, day-to-day life level, ordinary people can talk and chat with each other without someone snooping on what they say in order to target ads at them. These are all very good things.

Do the good uses outweigh the bad? In my opinion, they do—for now. Do any of us seriously believe that were it not for commercial companies bad people wouldn’t be able to chat secretly? Of course they could—and they have been doing so. Stopping ordinary people from preserving their privacy will never stop bad people using encrypted communications for bad purposes because—by definition—they don’t follow the law.

The larger question here is who should control access to these new communication channels? There are open source alternatives to Facebook (diaspora* is one, and the asterisk is part of the name) and WhatsApp (Signal is one) that don’t collect data on their users. But they’re infinitesimally small compared to Facebook—of course. Could it be that, despite all our complaints, we’re okay with Facebook controlling so much of our online communications?

None of us knows where this is all headed, but everything changes, so Facebook needs to evolve, and not just to avoid becoming “social media’s retirement home” (as if there couldn’t be a role for such a thing…). MySpace was once the biggest social network around, and it’s pretty much irrelevant now. Meanwhile, governments threaten regulation and more. Users threaten to walk away. Despite all that, nothing much is happening yet, but whether Facebook survives will depend on how it responds to these challenges. Oddly enough, that will also answer the question of whether it should it be allowed to survive.

Time will tell. We’ll all have to watch our newsfeed for a while longer, it seems.

The chart up top from Statista shows the share of the U.S. population using Facebook by age group.