Social media giant Facebook, which recently rebranded to Meta, yesterday revealed that it had experienced its first drop ever in daily active users since its inception in 2004.
This is according to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg who announced that research done last quarter (during the last three months of 2021) showed that the daily active usage had dropped from 1.93 billion to 1.929 billion, hence a 25% fall in shares and dropping over $200 billion in value.
According to Zuckerburg, the fall in the number of users was instigated by the immense competition the app faced by other social apps, mainly TikTok. However, RX Radio Presenter Olive Najjuma thinks that the huge fall was also escalated by Facebook's recent content censorship policies.
“There’s the rivals but let’s not forget how Facebook is treating its users lately. You say something very small and you are cut off for like a month. Now they are taking it to the extreme; it can even be 60 days,” she contended.
As a culprit, James Onen aka Fatboy the show’s Co-host, said that suspension had kept him off the app twice in 60 days which he said could be happening to many others. “Within three months last year, I got blocked for 30 days and after 2 days of reinstatement, I was blocked again. So I was off Facebook for 60 days in total, almost ⅔ of the quarter. And if this is happening to millions of other users, no wonder the degree of those using it is declining.”
Olive added, “Going through that several times can actually make you realize that you can live without Facebook, causing you to turn to other apps such as Tik Tok. Also, Facebook is for people who like having intellectual discourse, younger people are not interested in reading, or back and forth chatting.”
She continued, “They are interested in visual content. On Tik Tok, you can watch a 30-second video and move on to the next. Personally, I can spend an hour on the app without even noticing because there's a lot of educational content unlike Facebook.”
Fatboy too admitted that his daily usage of the app had declined because of the fear that he would get suspended given the action had happened to him several times before.
Olive, amused, said that although she had never been suspended, she was warned once and now seldomly uses the app. She also said that unlike Facebook, TIkTok provides age-appropriate content users which is uncommon with other Zuckerberg apps like Instagram.
“My son is not allowed to have a Facebook account but he has one for Tik Tok because unlike Facebook, Tik Tok has gone the extra mile to make sure that content is filtered according to someone's age which Facebook and Instagram have so far failed to do.”
Feeling no sympathy for Facebook and happy that it was experiencing falling numbers, Fatboy said, “The fall from 1.93 to 1.929 might not seem like a big reduction but the spiral is happening and they are nervous about it which is a good thing because I feel like they are an evil company. They’ve done very many unethical things. So I ain't got no love for them.”
Olive bursting in laughter, commented “I think that hatred is political, it has Donald Trump wrapped around it.”
The Fatboy show is hosted by James Onen aka Fatboy, Olive, Sarah and Lesham every weekday from 6am to 10am on RX Radio.
Comentários