2026 has seen the social media landscape shift massively. I have heard nothing but moans and groans about Facebook, What’s App and Instagram so far this year, and even threads is getting stick now. It seems that the general public are finally tiring of how Meta wants to monetise everything and insert as many ads as possible into everything. The news that they are sacking more than 10% of their workforce due to massive spending on AI has also started an avalanche of people moving away. To just be clear, this is mainly a UK sentiment at the moment as I am UK based, but I am only hearing negative things about Meta and its social media platforms right now. Recently Instagram has been on the receiving end because people are no saying that you get far fewer likes and engagement is way down – I do have to say I am seeing plenty of platforms struggling here, but historically Meta was less subject to this, or maybe more immune to this as their user base is so big, but even that seems to not offset the malaise I see over social media nowadays. I think the biggest issue here for Meta is that they are not a privacy focused company at all. If you join the Meta family of products you know your data will be sold everywhere and that you are going to see some repercussions, but increasingly people would rather have more privacy and the general consensus seems to be that Meta is a poor company to trust your details with…
To add to the woes, Meta and Google/Youtube seems to be increasingly on the receiving ends of legislative justice making their current modus operandi subject to big changes. More and more countries and even US states are mandating age verification, and the days of a every platform offering “free” accounts is slowly drawing to a close as if you take payment you have a lot more freedom of how you can conduct business. I see increasing amounts of orphaned or child accounts that have not been updated in a few years, which doesn’t mean people don’t use the platforms, but it does point to a shift in usage. You can see this with Meta penalising links away from Facebook and Youtubes ongoing war against ad blockers!
To sum up – I don’t think this is the end of Meta as a company, people still use the products – but more a change in habits. The days of Facebook being the go to platform for social media are drawing to a close, but I’m not sure the fragmentation that is going on is any better in the long run…
