Unfriending Facebook: New Research On Why People Like Facebook Less

In the most recent Infinite Dial study from Edison Research and Triton Digital, we revealed that social media growth in America has seemingly stalled, and that Facebook, in particular, has seen a decline in usage. Now, let’s be clear here: decline or no, Facebook remains the number one social media network in America, and not by a little. However, since 2017, Facebook usage among Americans 12+ (and yes, I know Facebook is technically 13+) declined from 67% to 61%. To put that in hard numbers, that is a loss of approximately 15 million users in two years.

This does not mean that 15 million people deleted their accounts. In fact, Facebook might very well have gained users, at least in terms of user accounts. But that’s what servers measure. Surveys, like our nationally representative Infinite Dial research, instead measure what people perceive; whether they went through the draconian process of actually deleting their accounts or not, about 15 million fewer humans perceive that they are using Facebook than we reported in 2017.

We were, of course, naturally curious if this decline was with any particular demographic group, and it turns out…