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Facebook Is Losing Users In the US and Canada (engadget.com) 103

Posted by BeauHD from the losing-steam dept.
User growth in the United States in Canada -- the company's most lucrative ad market -- has declined, Facebook reported as part of its third-quarter earnings. Engadget reports: The company now has 196 million users in North America, down slightly from 198 million last quarter. In a statement, the company said the decrease was expected, and could continue through the end of the year. "As expected, in the third quarter of 2020, we saw Facebook DAUs and MAUs in the US & Canada decline slightly from the second quarter 2020 levels which were elevated due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic," Facebook wrote in a press release. "In the fourth quarter of 2020, we expect this trend to continue and that the number of DAUs and MAUs in the US & Canada will be flat or slightly down compared to the third quarter of 2020."

The company had previously reported a large surge in growth at the start of the year due to widespread coronavirus lockdowns. Facebook isn't seeing the same slowdown everywhere, though, and the social network is continuing to add new users in Asia and its "rest of world" markets. The company also continued to tout its "family of apps" metrics, which combines Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. That number rose to 2.54 billion "daily active people" in September, according to the company. The slowdown also doesn't seem to have affected Facebook's revenue, which was up to $21.4 billion for the quarter, an increase of 22 percent from last year and better than analyst expectations for the company.
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Facebook Is Losing Users In the US and Canada More

Facebook Is Losing Users In the US and Canada

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  • Yeah (Score:3, Informative)

    by puterg33k ( 1920022 ) on Thursday October 29, 2020 @08:32PM (#60664290) Homepage
    Fuck Facebook and fuck you too Beau

  • Well what did they expect? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Moryath ( 553296 ) on Thursday October 29, 2020 @08:40PM (#60664312)
    They've been so milquetoast about removing the truly toxic elements - QAnon cultists, Gamergate style misogynists, anti-LGBT crusaders and so on - that even Twitter has gotten better than them about it. They're watching Popper's Paradox of "Tolerance" [youtube.com] play out in action as those toxic groups drive more and more people away from their platform. It's kind of like happened to Slashdot's commenting community for a large part years ago too, you can only put up with so many screamers, karma pointfarmers, and "GNAA" spammers before you mostly give up on the site.

    • Re:Well what did they expect? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Captivale ( 6182564 ) on Thursday October 29, 2020 @09:16PM (#60664434)

      Yeah, they sure do need to remove all those various terrible people from FB, who, by total coincidence, all happen to have the opposite political opinions from us cool, smart, superior geniuses.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        It's not an "opinion" when you are organizing your people to hang out at polls with guns to intimidate people or kidnap politicians. It's not an opinion when your conspiracy theories causes mentally ill people to believe and act on them.

        Only one side in this is making trouble and calling it free speech and opinions.

        • Only one side is causing trouble? You mean the side rioting and burning neighborhoods?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

          It's not an "opinion" when you are organizing your people to hang out at polls with guns to intimidate people or kidnap politicians. It's not an opinion when your conspiracy theories causes mentally ill people to believe and act on them.

          Only one side in this is making trouble and calling it free speech and opinions.

          Kidnap politicians? Oh, you mean antifa? Those guys? Yes, the guys that tried to kidnap Witmer turned out to be Antifa. Leftists as they always are. Surprising how people still believe the left. They hated Trump and wanted to kidnap Republican governors too.

          https://www.freep.com/story/ne... [freep.com]

          Facebook should be eliminating the BTQ, antifa, BLM, Democrats, anyone on the left. They're the real crackpots and history shows us that.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Standing up for QAnon is a weird hill to die on, buddy.

      • Re:Well what did they expect? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Friday October 30, 2020 @09:45AM (#60665806) Journal

        Yeah, they sure do need to remove all those various terrible people from FB, who, by total coincidence, all happen to have the opposite political opinions from us cool, smart, superior geniuses.

        The OP talked about misogynists etc. So you're saying misogyny is a right wing position? WTF dude.

        Look, I am not politically right wing, but you seem to really, really despise the right.

      • Re:Well what did they expect? (Score:5, Informative)

        by tflf ( 4410717 ) on Friday October 30, 2020 @11:04AM (#60666072)

        Yeah, they sure do need to remove all those various terrible people from FB, who, by total coincidence, all happen to have the opposite political opinions from us cool, smart, superior geniuses.

        It's not an opinion when it's disinformation and blatant lies. Everyone has a right to express their opinion, but, no one has the right to make crap, start spreading unfounded rumors, defaming others or fostering violence. No one has the right to parrot crap someone else made up for those purposes.

        If we have to spout off on-line, we should put some thought, research and effort into it. Most people prefer to be challenged by a well-thought contrary opinion instead of being pissed off by one more example of blatant ignorance and stupidity.

        While I'm not a prude, and recognize sometimes profanity is called for, mindless profanity is tiring, and boring. I worked for the railroad for 35 years, where profanity was often raised to the level of an art form. Every example of it I have seen on-line pales in comparison. Another time where, if you cannot do it effectively, with vigor and some imagination, it's probably not worth doing at all.

        On-line, as in life, profanity is too often the safe haven of the ill-informed and the lazy. It also a very f....ing crappy alternative to informed, rational opinion.

      • Yeah, they sure do need to remove all those various terrible people from FB, who, by total coincidence, all happen to have the opposite political opinions from us cool, smart, superior geniuses.

        That's what happens during a misinformation campaign that is played by only one side. I often hear stories about this mythical "extreme left" but I've yet to see it. I mean every mention of Antifa and equally aligned groups who we have been told to hate seems to result in a misaccusation and the incident didn't actually involve these extremists at all.

        Why do you suppose that is?

    • Oh fuck off, as if facebook membership is affected by a small minority of alt-right-wingers. If that were the case, no doubt the equally aggravating new wave feminists and black lives matter nutters would also be driving people away. FB membership is declining because Mums and Dads have realised what a shithole ALL social media platforms are for driving addictive behaviour, and their kids won't ever use FB because then their parents might see what they are up to.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • If you are seeing toxic content on your facebook feed, its because either the algorithm thinks you want it, or your friends are posting it. It thinks you want it because you are commenting on it or clicking on it or reading it. Stop commenting/reading/clicking it. Other than that, you might just need new friends.

          • That's not true. FB shows not just what it thinks you want to see, it also shows promoted content and has an internal bias decided by their feed team. At some point even run experiments on the public, shaping their feeds, to see the impact it has.

            Even if they select from your liked channels and friend posts there is plenty of wiggle room to bias the feed - include this, skip that.

            If there is one thing I would not allow FB, Twitter and Google to control is the feed ranking/filtering algorithm. There sh

          • Facebook doesn't care what you want. They care what leads to interaction/response and more time spent on the site. That means extreme opinions that lead to flame wars are a perfect fit.

      • Faceberg drives up suicide rates. This tells all you need to know about the intentions for the platform. If anyone thinks Zucc is benevolent you are too naive for this world.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Why are you using the platform if you disagree with their moderation? There is no shortage of other social media sites that agree with your views.

      • OK now I'm curious. What veryfibly false lieftist stuff is there?
        Stuff on the scale of Obamacare Deathcamps, QAnon, rightwing counter-BLM actions and Pizza/Climategate. You know things that, if they came from a single entity, would punishable unter inciting to riot/disturbing the peace laws. Mind you I'm not saying it doesnt exist. I'm saying that it doesnt have near as much reach and scope as the latest foxnews_promoted_fotm_lefttist_outrage.
        I'm talking about stuff from western democracies btw.

      • Agreed, Dice turned Slashdot into a corporate site instead of a techie site. Slashdot never recovered.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          It's got a hell of a lot better since Bizx took over. The new owners deserve a lot of credit for fixing the very long standing problems, particularly the sock puppet accounts and moderation abuse. It's not perfect but it's not the far right echo chamber it was some years back.

          • From where I'm sitting there is just about as much of that stuff as there has ever been. Recently there seems to be less n@z! spam, but there is just as much tramp 2020 bullshit. And sock puppets are still a major force.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              It was always going to get worse close to the election but look at the moderation recently. It's not all just far right crap now, moderate and left leaning posts get positive scores again.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by onyxruby ( 118189 )

      Your showing your own bigotry, and in turn showing why Facebook is driving away so many users. By creating purity tests and classifying people that fail those tests as toxic you create more and more deplorables. It doesn't take long before the deplorables outnumber those who pass the purity tests.

      That's the thing about purity tests and SJW's. You can never be good enough, that which passed yesterdays tests can readily fail tomorrows. Whether it's a tv show, artists, performer, book, or politicians really do

      • Re:Well what did they expect? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by fropenn ( 1116699 ) on Friday October 30, 2020 @10:48AM (#60666028)
        People on the right who get "censored" from various activities are often doing this intentionally to try to make a point about how the "right is always getting censored." They then uses this as "proof" that their "viewpoint" must be correct because it has been blocked. Which doesn't really prove anything and is totally circular once you think about it.

    • The problem isn't the toxic comment threads on news articles or your toxic friends posts. The problem is news and promoted content. If I actually wanted the news, I would go to a news site. If I wanted to buy something, I would go to an online store. I go to facebook to see baby pictures and life updates from people I know. Facebook has less and less of that every day because its getting drowned out by ads and viral bullshit.

      • That's what they said about personal email. But grandma couldn't stop hitting that forward button. Now, that forward button has been gamified - it's like a slot machine. No payoff but you keep pushing the buttons.

        The blame certainly rests partly with Facebook, but it seems that people aren't actually interested in sharing life updates and baby photos. It just isn't as exciting and has a much smaller impact.

    • Slashdotâ(TM)s problem isnâ(TM)t really those extreme groups or anything like that. The problem is the redesign of the site. It turned off a lot of users and it is still doing that. When I show the site to a potential new user, they always complain about the (default) comment design which is very confusing and frankly unusable.

  • Facebook in decline (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The1stImmortal ( 1990110 ) on Thursday October 29, 2020 @08:40PM (#60664314)

    This is despite trying to force users of services like Instagram and Oculus users into becoming "Facebook" users.

    Goodbye and good riddance.

  • Go the way of Myspace and Yahoo (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Thursday October 29, 2020 @09:06PM (#60664402)

    Facebook needs to go the way of Myspace and Yahoo, and the world will be a better place for it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Who will take over Facebook? :P

    • Re:Go the way of Myspace and Yahoo (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Mordaximus ( 566304 ) on Friday October 30, 2020 @03:56AM (#60665138)

      Facebook wasn't (initially) inherently bad; it became bad as more users joined. Same as Myspace, Yahoo, and IRC before it.

      Whatever follows will also get ruined by people.

    • Facebook needs to go the way of Myspace and Yahoo, and the world will be a better place for it.

      I agree, but only after we replace it with a viable and widely used alternative. Where you see a shitty advertisement company bilking users for all their data, others see a one to many communications platform without equal (if for nothing other than network effects).

      What you're saying is the equivalent to "Cars need to go the way of a horse and carriage" without posing the question of why people use cars in the first place and offering them an alternative.

  • Were they users or bots? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Thursday October 29, 2020 @09:19PM (#60664454)
    Yeah...that's the downside of cleaning bots off your site. Your user count goes down.

    I am very familiar with the bot detection industry. It's pretty good these days if you're willing to hire a major player. Sites from Slashdot to Facebook would have a lot less trolls, particularly on topics of interests to foreign governments, like presidential elections, if they really wanted to. It's not even that expensive.

    Advertising companies just have no economic interest in being honest with their market. Google, Twitter, and Facebook have no interest in confirming that ad impression was from a real human being....or confirming that person posting political diatribes on a page about an election in Dallas was actually located in Texas vs somewhere a known bot farm somewhere in the former Soviet Union. It's depressing and disgusting, but I guess its the world we live in.

    • Re:Were they users or bots? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by xleeko ( 551231 ) on Friday October 30, 2020 @06:32AM (#60665372)

      Yeah...that's the downside of cleaning bots off your site. Your user count goes down.

      Like the old MacWeek and other trade journals. All liars poker. If you wanted a subscription, you just claimed to control $1m+/yr purchasing decisions because that got you the subscription.

      The publisher didn't care, never checked, and never wanted to check because it made the reach numbers they presented to advertisers look better. I'm sure that the advertisers knew the numbers had a large BS constant multiplied in, too. But it worked because they were reaching people who were interested, even if they didn't have the clout they claimed.

      FB has plenty of bots, but they are also losing flesh and blood users, like the one sitting behind my keyboard. Deleted my acct mid September. Got tired of sitting by the ringside to see which of my friends would get into a fight next. As another friend said after I left, "they optimize for engagement, and argument is engagement"

  • On Slashdot. With no irony.

  • People want to be entertained, and the apps that are making it are the ones that are helping people entertain themselves.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Kreela ( 1770584 )
      I've noticed a big increase in friends on various social networks referring to their use of Duolingo, and other open learning platforms such as the OpenWho or OpenLearn courses. People are starting to realise that the aggravation of Facebook isn't a good use of their time, and there are better ways to use the internet.

  • Did the users left? Or were they banned because they posted/shared things the Facebook don't like?

  • People are going to continue to leave as they realize that Facebook is continuing to suppress the voices of half of the population in the country because they don't align, politically, with their liberal voice.

    • or they'll leave because Facebook continues to violate privacy and sell personal info, even after getting in trouble for it repeatedly.

  • 198m idiots in America and China.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • User growth declined? it's negative (Score:3)

    by Visarga ( 1071662 ) on Friday October 30, 2020 @02:02AM (#60664996)
    Not just user growth declined but also the absolute value.
  • Same happened with MySpace for example

  • My understanding is that kids are on Instagram & Tiktok nowadays.
    Which makes no sense to me since both are supposed to be microblogs, for photos and selfie videos, resp.

  • Checked the comments on this story, hoping for some recommendations on FB replacements. Maybe there isn't one?

    Plain old email isn't broadcast enough. Another problem I have with emails these days is that my accounts are flooded with spam. Some of that is FB spam, about joining groups FB thinks I might be interested in. Inside FB there is anniversary spam: "You have been connected to Joe for 4 years now!!!"

    One could maintain one's own website, as many of us used to do way back in the 1990s. But, lo

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Kreela ( 1770584 )
      There certainly isn't one that's as all-encompassing, and that's probably a good thing. NextDoor, may be useful if you want neighbourhood news local to you - it varies a lot depending on uptake where you are, though, and works poorly with NoScript enabled. Mastodon, if you want conversation in a Twitter-like format. The tone of that very much depends on the community you join. Most Mastodon instances skew left. There's a lot of good tech-related content on WT.Social, but it's somewhat quiet.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Facebook's unhinged censorship doesn't help (Score:4, Insightful)

    by blind biker ( 1066130 ) on Friday October 30, 2020 @06:17AM (#60665340) Journal

    The way they memory-holed almost anything that could endanger Biden's ascent to power is awesome (not in a good way) to behold. FB has become the embodiment of the spirit of 1984.

  • I suspect some users have moved on to MeWe where free specch still exists and is respected, and censorship is null and void.

  • That new user interface on PC that I had to start using today might just chase me off! It's awful in dark mode and funny enough, now it uses the entire width of the screen but just moves the blank space to the middle thirds of the screen. But it's great that they offer "compact mode" which reduces the font size by a point or two.

  • Between the interface change and the constant tweaking of the UI to deliver what the advertisers want you to see, as opposed to what users actually want to see, and the resultant constant cock-blocking of browser plugins like Social Fixer and Fluff-Busting Purity to compensate.

    Then again, we users aren't Facebook's customers. . . .we're the PRODUCT. . . .

  • Is it possible that will Flash no longer being supported some games are going away and that's what was keeping some of these people involved?

    If it wasn't for all those games, I could very likely move my wife onto a different communications platform along with all her friends, but they all love those little games.

  • Maybe they should quit arbitrarily blocking users if they don't want to lose users. I recommend that everyone download their archives and NOT use Facebook login ANYWHERE. They can lock you out of everything that requires Facebook for login.
  • Considering the mass censorship and increasingly asinine rules, it's not surprising. All they had to do was be a public use platform, make money from ad revenues...instead, they sell private info, and censor anyone that the twitterverse deems unpalatable.

  • Latest travesty: They decide that I've been reading/posting too long/much and tell me (paraphrase) that they've temporarily revoked my access because I might be a spammer. After maybe 15 minutes while I'm reading and responding to the posts in my Notifications list. If I'm barred with Firefox/linux I'm likewise barred with Chrome/linux.

    FB is much better if you use Social Fixer with a robust set of filters; you can make it perhaps 10% as good as usenet, which is a fantastic improvement.

    Fuck them sideways w

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