"Facebook is not dead nor dying." That Facebook director Tom Alison felt the need to state this explicitly in a press release, in March 2023, is a good indicator of the reputation the social network launched on February 4, 2004, suffers from.

"Old-fashioned," "Dinosaur," "It's for old people!": This is how some internet users, responding to a call for testimonials from Le Monde, described the platform. And yet, as Alison claimed, Facebook is "in fact alive and thriving." The latest quarterly figures, published on Thursday, February 1, speak for themselves: Every day, 2.11 billion people log on, the equivalent of a quarter of the world's population – an increase of 6% in one year.

So is Facebook outdated? "The aging problem is serious," alarmedly noted a Facebook researcher in 2021, in a memo revealed by the "Facebook Files" – the number of American teenagers on the platform had then dropped by 13% in two years. The same observation applies to France. Sophie Jehel, a professor at l’Université Paris-VIII, analyzes the digital habits of thousands of 10^th-grade students in Normandy every year. In 2018, 65% of them reported using Facebook. Today, only 31% do, based on the latest version of the report, to be published in February. They much prefer YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. "When they still talk about Facebook, it's to talk about their parents," noted the researcher.

'The social network of the working classes'

The 31% who remain loyal to Mark Zuckerberg's network "stay for family relationships," noted Jehel, who pointed out that these young users "are often the most socially disadvantaged, with the least academic qualifications."

And this observation is not limited to teenagers. In Facebook usage, "there's a generational divide, but also a social one," admitted Romain Badouard, lecturer at l’Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas. "It's the social network of the working classes. Behind the talk of being old-fashioned, there's the idea that cultural, media, and intellectual elites will favor other platforms."

A form of snobbery, then. The researcher, a social media specialist, pointed out another bias: "Considering Facebook to be outdated is a Western point of view. As soon as you look beyond that, you realize that it's still widely used and growing fast in the countries of the South."

Three quarters of its daily active users are outside the United States, Canada and Europe. And while Facebook lost one million users in Europe between 2021 and 2023, and recorded "only" 10 million new registrations in the US and Canada, the social network gained 172 million users elsewhere in the world over the same period.

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