Parents to Blame for Facebook Not Being Cool Anymore

Our friends in Europe are bored of Facebook already and are increasingly looking towards other platforms for their social networking. A new study has found that teenagers today are migrating away from Facebook in favour of cooler services such as Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp.   The European Union-funded research on global social networking trends discovered that these four platforms have emerged  as top contenders to topple Facebook.

It took 15 months to complete the comprehensive European study, with the team of researchers compiling 1,000 survey results. According to University College London (UCL) material sciences professor Daniel Miller, teenagers are embarrassed to use Facebook and are adopting new social networking platforms and apps to avoid being spied on by their parents. For this reason, Facebook is ‘simply not cool anymore.’ Apparently, teens don’t seem to care that Facebook is more technically sophisticated than other platforms. It was also observed that the younger generation doesn’t seem all that concerned about being spied on by corporations or shadowy government agencies.

In this case, we are guessing the European teens didn’t care much about what happened on December 31, 2013. On New Year’s Eve, hackers posted a database of 4.6 million Snapchat usernames and phone numbers online. Snapchat is a mobile app which people use to send each other self-destructing videos and photos. The good news is that this was more of a creepy event than alarming in the sense of security. But obviously it was still a massive breach of privacy.

This is all very interesting to us considering that the alternative social networks are just catching fire in Zambia. In fact, I don’t know anyone among my friends who uses Snapchat yet. WhatsApp is definitely more mainstream than Twitter and Instagram. However, I expect as all things tech, we will see a dramatic change in the next few years. At the moment the Facebook digital wave is soaring as one of the main modes of communication in Zambia, email has got nothing on Facebook messenger. It is then followed by WhatsApp. Twitter and Instagram are not that far behind. While, Snapchat is still in oblivion.

Study Source: Comunitee