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1w ago

Teens abandon X and Facebook as TikTok and WhatsApp gain momentum, report

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Technology @lemmy.ml

www.techspot.com /news/105949-nearly-half-all-teens-online-almost-constantly-but.html

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I think teens abandoned Facebook like 10 years ago
- Surely longer ago than that? Facebook hasn't been cool for probably over 15 years
  
  Has FB been cool since they got rid of signups limited by .edu email addresses?
  
  It went downhill when poking and sheep throwing went away.
- Teens stopped using Facebook in 2015.

Because Whatsapp is totally not owned by FB.
- It’s not about why owns it. It’s about where young people can be without getting bothered by their parents and other old people.
  
  I'm 41.....you telling me the kids today don't think of me as the greatest person who ever existed??? Pssshhh that's malarkey! I won't hear of it! EVERYONE thinks I'm the greatest person who ever existed! My lexicon includes words like "malarkey" and "lexicon"! Kids think that's cool right???
  
  That's about phone number requirement for signup. Not about platforms.
  OK. Life is life.
  I've just had a traumatic memory of one young person, a girl (with possibly undiagnosed ASPD), from 13 years ago.
  Feel nausea and want to throw up every time thinking about that kind of places, dynamics, emotions.

Where there any teens on Twitter? Last I was there it was full of angry middle-age men.
- before musk came it was pretty full, most of them have moved to threads
- Ah, the curse of algorithmic social network. It’s full of angry middle-aged men if you follow those / interact with them. There are / were big communities formed around various pop stars on Twitter and those are quite different demographics.
- The Internet- where men are men...
  
  Men? Wait, yall aren't dogs using the internet while the humans are away at work?
  Yall are dogs to right?

It's pretty clear. Facebook is now full of crap created by artificial intelligence (and not only).
- Tiktok is as well.
- 463k people actually liked that photo?
  
  It's a video

That is a weird way of describing it. Teens aren't "abandoning" FB & X; they never signed up to begin with. And why would that? They are platforms built for and filled with millennials+.

A decade ago is when teens stopped using Facebook, unless they're counting Instagram in those metrics?
- then they would have to count WhatsApp too...
- Look at the graph in the article: it’s the only newsworthy piece. Assuming the numbers are legit, the lines crossed about 6 years ago.
  Of course the x axis not having any labeled points there doesn’t fill me with confidence. Perhaps it’s just two points for each and they drew a straight line

Isn't whatsapp another data mining app for Facebook?
- Yes, although to nowhere near the same extent as Facebook and Instagram.
  The chats are E2EE using Signal's encryption protocol, so very good.
  But they will certainly mine everything else they can get. They may not know what you're saying, but they do know who you're talking to, when you're doing it, your contacts, your profile pic, how often you send images, etc. any web links with tracking info embedded in the URL will likely be tracked too, once you open them.
  
  E2EE doesn't mean that the developer/company can't be a member of the "ends" in "End-to-end encryption". WhatsApp is closed-source, so nobody can really confirm which E2EE algorithm is at play. However, considering that the E2EE is the implementation of a known E2EE algorithm, such algorithms often support more than two keys (hence, more than two people), so, a third-key from Charlie can be part of the conversation, unbeknownst to Alice and Bob. If Meta would inject their own key inside every WhatsApp conversation, they could effectively read things.
  For example: GPG/PGP support multiple public keys, so the same encrypted message can be decrypted by any private keys belonging to those public keys. Alice can send a message to both Bob, Charlie and Douglas, collectively specifying their public keys at the moment of the encryption. Then, the exact same payload would be sent to them, and they would use their own private keys to decrypt the message.
  So, let's suppose that a closed-source messaging app company/developer had their own pair of public and private keys, and they public key is injected in every conversation made through their app. They'd also obfuscate it from the UI so the UI won't show the hardcoded "third-party". This way they could easily read every single message being exchanged through their app. It's like TSA with a "master key" that can open everyone's travelling bags, no matter where you bought the travelling bag.
  Even Signal may have this. Yeah, libsignal is "open-source", but the app isn't. What if their app had some hardcoded public key from Signal team? The only trustworthy E2EE is encoding it yourself using OpenPGP and similar. And if one is more privacy-worried than me, there are projects such as the "Tinfoil Chat" which is almost-immune to eavesdropping, involving optocoupled (hence, airgapped) circuitry, separate machines for networking, decryption and encryption, Onion-routing, and so on.
  In summary: nobody should trust out-of-the-box E2EE, especially those hidden within a closed-source app.
  
  This still baffles me. What's Facebook's end game here? They are built on data collection and spying, but they own an app that is E2EE.
- Yes

Okay? But what does Whatsapp has anything to do with the other? DM?
I don't consider WhatsApp social media.
- WhatsApp has channels (public feeds centered around topics, a bit like microblogging), communities (groups about a subject, much like Facebook Groups), and updates (temporal video/photo statuses to share with your friends). You might only use it for DM, but it has much bigger aspirations.

Ok, I feel old. The only reason facebook has any relevance to me is the market place. What’s the best alternative?
- That's just it, Facebook is kinda the default option, and almost everyone has an account there. It's why so many clubs arrange everything through a Facebook page.
- Craigslist, cash converters
  
  It might be that I’m looking at this from a US perspective. Craig’s list has been a bit rough when I’ve tried it. Scammy and shadier people. I hope you’ve had better experiences here than me.
  I found cash converters out of the UK. Is that correct? It seemed comparable to a pawn shop at first glance.

My family has a signal group. I started it two years ago.
Almost no one pays any attention to it, unless they accidentally open the app once a month, but they're all still there and can be spoken to.
I put a PSA out a month ago that I'll no longer respond on Facebook Messenger or SMS after the turn of the year. Tough shit. There was some groaning but, if there's no other way, either use Signal or invest in a Pigeon coop and get training.
- There was some groaning but, if there’s no other way, either use Signal or invest in a Pigeon coop and get training.
  Any particular reason you are abandoning SMS? Any particular reason for the strict rule?
  
  RCS ain't universal. I only have it with some iPhone users and the rare Pixel.
  If it's what's for dinner, I don't care. Musk can know I had some hamburger steak.
  If it's the code to your tablet, mom, ask on Signal.

This is news? The article’s own graph puts this about 6 years ago

WhatsApp? The instant messenger boomers use on their phones?
Damn, who saw that coming.
- american, right? It's very popular in other places.
- Most countries stopped using SMS ages ago. WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram are ubiquitous.
  
  I WISH signal was ubiquitous. Half of my friends are still using Facebook Messenger so I still have to resort to using SMS for them
- Spotted the iMessage user who routinly cries about dot colour
  
  Weird that this is your association as using it would require an iPhone which most youth don't have. My thought was Telegram, which is omnipresent at least around me, with Whatsapp often being kept just for the parents or older relatives.
- In most of Europe WhatsApp is synonymous with text messaging.
  
  Also in South Asia and the Middle East.
- Yeah, the other instant messenger owned by Facebook

Weird, considering facebook does all the shit those other sites do.
- People go where their friends are. Their grandparents are on Facebook.

Teens are on Facebook?
- How else you gonna cyber bully the transfer student

Gee I wish they had just left Facebook as a way to share photos and updates with friends and family, instead of turning it into a viral content clusterfuck to capture the youth audience. It didn’t even work.
- Marketplace function is their future IMHO
  
  Craigslist eventually got rid of personals, give it a decade

well Facebook still owns them and will own them when they all switch to instagram reels like America wants them to do

No teens on blue sky, nice
- I had to block a few ones on Bluesky.

I guess I'll never know what the kids are saying ever again because there's no way I'm installing either of those apps.

Sadly Elon Musk remains a threat to us all.

Gyna

it's why politicians want to ban it
- They’ve been trying to ban it for awhile now, so no. They want to ban it because they can’t directly control the companies that own those platforms overseas whereas Facebook, IG, etc. are very much able to be controlled if necessary by those in power
  
  It's a delicate topic. TikTok collects a ton of data from devices and infers a ton of data from watching patterns. This is really true of most of the modern web apps, but especially true of TikTok because the short-form means more content to churn through, and the algorithm is practically an IV drip of dopamine.
  The much, much more important issues are user privacy and truth-in-media, and is something that just as well needs to be pointed at Meta and Twitter and Reddit and Google. TikTok is probably more critical at the present moment, because it's run by a country our president-elect wants to start a trade-war with, and they've got quite an upper hand with all the data that we, the users, give them for free, via a propaganda machine under their control.
  
  Proper analysis.
  People really underestimate the state corpo connections when looking at their own regime and domestic corpos. Since these are "our" guys

Isn't whatsapp for old people? Drag uses Discord instead. It's not great, but at least it doesn't hack your phone.
- As much as I dislike Whatsapp and love Discord. Private messages in Whatsapp are encrypted while Discord messages are entirely collected

96 comments