After years of scandals, congressional hearings, and generally bad vibes, it seems like people are finally (and slowly) leaving Facebook behind.
Meta, the new name for the parent company that encompasses Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus, released its earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2021 on Wednesday with one fairly shocking revelation hidden in the mountain of business-speak. Daily active users on Facebook dropped very slightly between the final two quarters of last year, from 1.93 billion to 1.929 billion.
That’s a change so minuscule that it’s a little tough to notice on first glance when looking at Meta’s earnings slides, but it’s there. The drop primarily happened in a vague “Rest of World” category, which basically means Latin America and Africa. CNBC confirmed that it was the first such quarterly drop in daily users on record for Facebook, and fell short of the 1.95 billion mark that analysts projected for the quarter.
Of course, there could be countless different reasons for why this specific drop in users occurred where and when it did. Without baselessly speculating, it’s mostly interesting because of how popular it’s gotten to call for people to divorce themselves from the platform in recent years. Between rampant COVID misinformation (and lax measures to prevent it), myriad scams, and the notion that the site allows harmful posts to propagate simply because they’re popular, anti-Facebook sentiment in public discourse seems to be at an all-time high.
Plus, it seems like everyone has experienced the demoralizing feeling of arguing with a loved one about politics on the site. That, alone, is enough to make plenty of people give it up. Regardless of the reasoning for the drop, Facebook’s next quarterly report just got a heck of a lot more interesting.
