After years of scandals, congressional hearings and generally bad practices, it seems that people are finally (and slowly) leaving Facebook behind.
Meta, the new name of the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus, published its earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2021 on Wednesday with a rather shocking revelation. The everyday active users on Facebook decreased very slightly between them two last quarter of last year, from 1,93 to 1,929 billion.
It's a change that's too subtle to notice at first glance, but it's there. The decline occurred mainly in a vague 'Rest of World' category, which essentially means Latin America and Africa. CNBC confirmed that it was the first quarterly drop in daily users on record for Facebook, and fell short of the 1,95 billion mark that analysts had predicted for the quarter.
Of course, there could be countless different reasons why this particular fall happened, where and when it happened. It will be interesting to know because the platform is very popular in recent years. Between the rampant misinformation about COVID, the myriad of scams, and the perception that the site is allowing harmful posts to spread simply because they go viral, anti-Facebook sentiment seems to be quite high.
But regardless of the rationale for the fall, Facebook's next quarterly report will be much more interesting.
