Facebook has 3 billion users. Many of them are old.

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Facebook says he’s not dead. Facebook also wants you to know that it’s not just for “old people,” as young people have been saying for years.

Now, with the biggest thorn on its side — TikTok — facing intense government scrutiny amid rising tensions between the US and China, perhaps Facebook can position itself as a domestically viable alternative.

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There’s just one problem: Guys like Devin Walsh have moved on.

“I can’t remember the last time I checked in. It must have been years ago,” said Walsh, 24, who lives in Manhattan and works in public relations.

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Instead, she checks Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook parent company Meta, about five or six times a day. Then there’s TikTok, of course, where you spend about an hour each day scrolling, letting the algorithm find things I “didn’t even know I was interested in.”

Walsh can’t imagine a world in which Facebook, which she joined when she was in sixth grade, would become a regular part of her life again.

“It’s the brand, right? When I think of Facebook, I think of uh, like older people, like parents who post pictures of their kids, random status updates and also people who squabble over political issues,” Walsh said, using the Gen Z term for things that are definitely not amazing.

The once-great social media platform that originated before the iPhone is nearly two decades old. For those who came of age by the time Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com from his Harvard dorm room in 2004, it had become inextricably integrated into everyday life — even if it had faded somewhat into the background over the years.

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Facebook faces a particularly strange challenge. Today, 3 billion people check it out every month. This represents more than a third of the world’s population. And 2 billion log in every day. However, it still finds itself in a battle for its relevance and future after two decades of existence.

For the younger generations – those who have enrolled in middle school, or those who are now in middle school, it is definitely not the place for that. Without this trend-setting demographic, Facebook, still the primary source of revenue for parent company Meta, risks fading into the background — utilitarian but boring, like email.

It wasn’t always like that. For nearly a decade, Facebook has been the place to be, a cultural touchstone, the thing so constantly referenced in everyday conversation and late-night television that its founding was the subject of a Hollywood movie. Rival MySpace, which launched just a year ago, is quickly becoming stale with the influx of cool kids on Facebook. MySpace’s fate was not helped by its sale to News Corp. in 2005.

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“It was such a strange combination… No one knew how the technology worked, but in order to have MySpace we all need to become micro-programmers. It was very stressful.” Moira Gaynor, 28, said, “Maybe that’s why Facebook took off. Because compared to MySpace, this beautiful, integrated, cool sharing area hasn’t been there before and we’re really longing after struggling with MySpace for so long.”

Setting himself up as a visionary, Zuckerberg refused to sell Facebook and propelled his company through the mobile revolution. While some competitors have appeared – remember Orkut? – It has generally fizzled out as Facebook has risen, and seems unstoppable despite scandals over user privacy and failure to adequately address hate speech and misinformation. It reached 1 billion daily users in 2015.

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Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst with Insider Intelligence who has been tracking Facebook since its early days, notes that younger users of the site have dwindled but don’t see Facebook going anywhere, at least not anytime soon.

“The fact that we’re talking about Facebook being 20 years old, I think is a testament to what Mark developed when he was in college. It’s incredible,” she said. “It’s still a very powerful platform around the world.”

AOL was also once powerful, but its user base has aged and the aol.com email address is now little more than a joke in a joke about technically illiterate people of a certain age.

Tom Allison, who is the president of Facebook (Zuckerberg’s title is now Meta CEO), sounded optimistic when he outlined the platform’s plans to appeal to young people in an interview with The Associated Press.

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“We used to have a team at Facebook focused on younger cohorts, or maybe there was a project or two dedicated to coming up with new ideas,” Allison said. “And about two years ago we said no – our entire product line needed to change, evolve and adapt to the needs of young people.”

He calls it the era of “social discovery”.

“It’s very much driven by what we see the next generation of social media want. The simple way I like to describe it is we want Facebook to be the place where you can connect with the people you know, the people you want to know, and the people you should You know them.

Artificial intelligence is central to this plan. Just as TikTok uses artificial intelligence and algorithms to show videos to people who don’t know they want to see Facebook, Facebook hopes to harness its powerful technology to win back the hearts and eyeballs of young people. The TikTok-like reels and videos Facebook and Instagram users get bombarded with when logged into both apps are also key. And of course private messages.

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“What we’re seeing is more people wanting to share reels and discuss reels, and we’re starting to integrate messaging features back into the app to once again allow Facebook to be a place where you don’t just discover cool stuff that’s relevant to you, but you share and discuss with your friends,” Alison said. the people”.

Facebook has consistently refused to disclose user demographics, which will shed some light on how it performs among young adults. But outside researchers say their numbers are declining. The same is true for teens — although Facebook appears to have backed away from actively recruiting teens amid concerns about the impact of social media on their mental health.

Young people often shape the future of communication. I mean, that’s how Facebook took off – young people gravitated to it. “And we’re seeing that happen with just about every social platform that’s hit the scene since Facebook,” Williamson said. This year, Insider estimates that about half of TikTok’s users are between the ages of 12 and 24.

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Williamson doesn’t see a reversal in this trend, but notes that Insider’s estimates only go as far as 2026. There is a decline, but it’s slow. That year, the research firm expects about 28% of Facebook users in the US to be between the ages of 18 and 34, compared to about 46% for TikTok and 42% for Instagram. The numbers are most pronounced for teens between the ages of 12 and 17.

“I think the best thing they can do is step away from a social platform. It’s like they’ve lost that. But hey, if they want to be the new Yellow Pages, why not?” said Gaynor, who lives in San Diego, California and works in government. “I really love Marketplace. I just moved in recently, so this is where I got most of my furniture.”