Facebook faced political scrutiny this week after it was revealed the company had handed over private messages between a young woman and her mother to Nebraska authorities investigating the death and disposalof a fetus.
The Great About Face: Generation Z Is Done with Meta & Facebook
August 13, 2022
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Facebook has met its match in Gen Z who aren’t having it with the company that now seems to be at odds with many as its intrusive policies and nanny state activities are turning off people in droves.
Gone are the days when pretty much everyone had a Facebook account. The social media behemoth is losing popularity, particularly among Gen Z. Only about 32 percent of American teens use Facebook today. Seven years back, the figure came in at a whopping 71 percent. Of course, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat are eating onto Facebook’s share.
Twitter is another social media platform that does not appeal to teens. With 33 percent usage in 2014-15, it wasn’t much popular among the 13 to 17 age group back in the days when TikTok didn’t even exist. The microblogging site has seen a further decline in teen users, with only about 23 percent of them now having a Twitter account.
This Per Research survey also asked American teens about their usage of Twitch, WhatsApp, Reddit, and Tumblr. The positive responses came from 20, 17, 14, and 5 percent of respondents, respectively. While the former three were not part of the 2014-15 survey, Tumblr had a usage percentage of 14 percent back then.
Back in 2012, 94% of teens had a Facebook account, a Pew Research survey of 12- to 17-year-olds found. Almost 10 years later, only 27% of adolescents say they’re on the platform, according to a 2021 survey of 10,000 teenagers conducted by Piper Sandler.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg aspires to end the youth exodus from his company’s flagship platform, saying on a Q3 earnings conference call on Monday that he wants Facebook to make “serving young adults the north star.”
But with its current user base, that won’t be so easy. Facebook predicts teen users of its flagship app to plummet by 45% over the next two years, adding to a 13% drop since 2019, according to data obtained by The Verge. That data was found in part through internal documents leaked by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen to the SEC and earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal.
“Our products are still widely used by teens, but we face tough competition from the likes of Snapchat and TikTok,” Joe Osborne, a spokesperson for Facebook, told the Verge when they asked about the internal documents referenced above. “All social media companies want teens to use their services. We are no different.”
Several Zoomers, many of whom said they used Facebook-owned Instagram but not Facebook’s flagship platform, told Insider there’s nothing the company could do to get them to sign up.
And that may get worse as more news becomes known, like how Meta/Facebook handed over private DMs between a mother and her daughter in Nebraska that led to their arrests.
The backlash was intense and quite frankly warranted but they had little choice say the Washington Post:
Facebook might have had a good reason to stay silent on that question. Legal experts said that even if the nature of the case had been spelled out, the company wouldn’t have had any alternative but to comply.
Prosecutors and local law enforcement have strict rules they must follow to obtain individuals’ private communications or location data to bolster a legal cases. Once a judge grants a request for users’ data, tech companies can do little to avoid complying with the demands.
That’s why, advocates say, social media platforms, telecom companies and other internet data brokers will have to limit what data they collect if they want to avoid helping the prosecution of women seeking abortions in states where the procedure is illegal.
“If the order is valid and targets an individual, the tech companies will have relatively few options when it comes to challenging it,” said Corynne McSherry, legal director at the privacy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That’s why it’s very important for companies to be careful about what they are collecting because if you don’t build it, they won’t come.”
How tech companies handle user data has come under growing scrutiny from privacy advocates, politicians and their own employees since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, making abortion illegal for millions of Americans. Privacy advocates have worried that tech companies’ massive collection of user data, from private messages to real-time location information to search results, could be used to prosecute those getting or facilitating abortions.
Despite repeated attempts in Congress, there is no comprehensive federal law protecting data privacy in the United States. On Thursday, the government’s top tech watchdog, the Federal Trade Commission, announced that it was exploring whether to create new federal rules to address privacy concerns surrounding health and location data.
“Some of the discussion around the recent Dobbs decision just underscores what many people have been saying for a long time: Consumer privacy is not just an abstract issue,” said Sam Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
In the Nebraska case, Celeste Burgess, now 18, and her mother, Jessica Burgess, were charged in June with concealing the death of a person, among other charges, after authorities alleged they tried to improperly bury the body of a stillborn fetus. Jessica Burgess was also charged with performing an abortion on a fetus older than 20 weeks. Abortion is legal in Nebraska up to the 20th week of pregnancy; a court affidavit cited medical records estimating Celeste Burgess was more than 23 weeks along when her fetus was aborted sometime between April 22 and April 29.
To bolster the case, a law enforcement officer asked a court to order Facebook to turn over private messages between the women. In his application, the officer said the women had told investigators that they had texted back and forth on Messenger about Celeste’s pregnancy. In the messages, the two women discussed how to take pills and get the “thing” out of Celeste’s body, according to court records.
For a court to issue a warrant for such conversations, the request must meet two conditions, experts said: evidence that a crime has been committed, and a narrowly tailored request giving such details as when the exchange took place and who was involved.
Many privacy activists say the abortion issue simply reinforces what they’ve been saying for years: Tech companies should collect less data that might be used in an abortion prosecution. Or messaging apps and device makers could implement end-to-end encryption, which means the data is scrambled so that outsiders, and even the company, cannot read it.
“This is obviously good for users of these devices because they don’t have to worry about who has access to what they assume are private conversations,” said Caitlin Seeley George, the campaign director of the privacy advocacy group Fight for the Future.
“It’s also good for the companies, because then they aren’t caught in this position where they have to try and defend themselves for their actions. They can just say, ‘We didn’t have an ability to share that information.’ ”
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
