When Mark Zuckerberg created a platform called Facebook no one imaged the role it would eventually come to play in global society with 2.32 billion users monthly. Today no one knows how the story will end, but a change seems inevitable.
In a post last month Zuckerberg appeared to be indicating that private messaging services will be the mode of conversation the social media platform will focus on, relegating the common publicly-shared newsfeeds to a second-hand status.
It shows a shift in thought.
“Facebook is wobbling because on the one hand it’s the most profitable company per dollar of revenue that ever existed, on the other it’s rapidly losing its social permission to operate,” Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick tells KTRH News.
Revelations of potential political malfeasance revealed in news stories about Cambridge Analytica’s role in the 2016 election, and Facebook’s participation with the company through sharing users information, have opened a dialogue that wasn’t anticipated. People have been abandoning their pages in droves since, and no longer the darling of social media, the company has come under scathing criticism.
“Facebook is so big and so powerful and so wealthy that it can’t go away in any short time frame, but the societal permission for Facebook to do what it does could rather quickly evaporate,” suggest Kirkpatrick.
Facebook has lost 15 million users in the past two years, most of them teens and Millennials. Perhaps their next chapter will be titled, “Relevance.”