Facebook Usage Has Collapsed After Privacy Scandals, Data Shows

mrspoonsi shares a report from the Guardian: Facebook usage has plummeted over the last year, according to data seen by the Guardian, though the company says usage by other measures continues to grow. Since April 2018, the first full month after news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in the Observer, actions on Facebook such as likes, shares and posts have dropped by almost 20%, according to the business analytics firm Mixpanel. Taking that month as a baseline, total actions fell by more that 10% within a month, recovered a bit over the summer and then fell again over the autumn and winter of 2018, except for a brief rally over the period of the U.S. midterm elections.

The decline coincided with a series of data, privacy and hate speech scandals. In September the company discovered a breach affecting 50 million accounts, in November it admitted that an executive hired a PR firm to attack the philanthropist George Soros, and it has been repeatedly criticized for allowing its platform to be used to fuel ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. 'On top of that, Facebook has continued to lose younger users, who are spreading their time and attention across other social platforms and digital activities,' eMarketer said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.