Courtney Stuart, a high school senior from Nashua, NH, doesn’t have a Facebook account. When her friends were signing up for the site as 13-year-olds, Stuart wasn’t allowed to have one. Now that she’s older, she doesn’t feel like she needs it.
“None of my friends really update their Facebook anymore,” Stuart said, “And when they do it’s just to put pictures up, mostly just for the moms.”
Instead, Courtney has a loyal following on Instagram and checks in on Twitter to keep up with friends. She says she doesn’t feel like she’s missing out by not having a Facebook account.
Courtney is not alone in this social switch. What has been a revolutionary technology is now showing signs that it has lost its novelty with today’s teenagers.
The notion is an old one, as surveys have shown for a couple of years that teens have been losing interest with the leading social media service. Most recently, asset management company Piper Jaffray last week released its semi-annual market research project, Taking Stock With Teens. The group surveyed more than 7,000 teens around the nation and found that less than half were using Facebook. According to the Washington Post, that’s a pretty dramatic fall-off from just months earlier. Instead, the survey showed, teens have flocked to Instagram and Twitter.
“Twitter is a more of a free thing,” said another teen, Kay Goodhart, 16, from Somerville, Mass. “The things you feel like you can’t post on Facebook, you can post on Twitter.”
Goodhart does have a Facebook account, but she only uses it occasionally to, as she puts it, “creep”—to find out information about people.
Part of the issue with Facebook, the teens say, is that it’s crowded with adults. When they see their parents or grandparents are the first to comment on or like their posts, it too closely resembles offline life.
That is, to some extent, by design. Facebook famously requires users to identify themselves. Some teens—and some web users in general—want the opportunity to use fake names on social media.
Goodhart says it is easier to create an online persona without attaching a name, which can be done on social services like Twitter, Tumblr, or Snapchat.
“(On Tumblr) you can be anonymous,” she said. “You can let people see this particular side of yourself that you can’t really on Facebook.”
Facebook seems to have noticed the clamor for anonymity. On Wednesday, it released a new app called Rooms, which allows users to anonymously share photos, videos, and texts based on a message board topic. It’s a throwback, at least in terms of its ideals, to the classic ‘90s chatroom, where anonymity ruled.
A standing question is whether teens who haven’t taken to Facebook will someday change their minds. You could imagine today’s teens feeling a sort of cultural pressure to join in a few years. It is, after all, still the leading social media site for most of the world. In that case, it would mean that a whole generation hasn’t rejected Facebook altogether, just that the rite of passage of creating an account comes a few years later. But if teen trends hold, those someday-users might not be joining Facebook to check in on their kids.
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