#facebook

#facebook

To rub salt into the wound, your big brother Facebook just keeps motoring on. Taking all your best ideas and frankly doing them better, sometimes worse, but eventually doing them better too. And with 1.7bn users (a mere 1.4bn more than you), is doing so in front of more people, hence attracting more and more advertisers who continue to flock to them in their droves.

In documents recently uncovered by The New York Times, Facebook demonstrated why losing the attention of younger teen users was one of the biggest threats facing the business. "If we lose the teen foothold in the US we lose the pipeline," reads the internal memo from last October. It seems Facebook had hoped Instagram would engage early high school users (aged 13-15) in a bid to replenish Facebook's aging user base.

In 2025, the continent's top Facebook markets reveal where the largest user bases are and how gender shapes social media engagement. Despite increasing competition from short-form video platforms such as TikTok and X, Facebook's combination of low data consumption, wide smartphone compatibility, and deep integration with WhatsApp has preserved its dominance in Africa's digital ecosystem. Based on 2025 data from World Population Review, the African countries with the largest Facebook user bases are:

Meta announced on Monday that it would be sunsetting two once-major features on Facebook: The external "Like" and Comment" social plugins. In a post on its developer site, Meta shared that the FB Like and FB Comment buttons will officially be discontinued on February 10, 2026. According to Meta, developers won't have to do anything. The plugins will simply render as an invisible 0x0 pixel at the end date. Meta says none of these changes should impact any website's functionality.

Last June, I met a wonderful longtime member of our community, Tom LeNoble. I have been fascinated with his story of resilience ever since that first meeting. I instantly realized this is a special person! Well, it turns out all of us can now read about his amazing life's journey. His autobiography, My Life in Business Suits, Hospital Gowns, and High Heels: In Control, Being Controlled, Out of Control!, is available now.

One of the most common questions creators and brands ask: "Is my engagement rate good?" The answer depends on your follower count. A 5% engagement rate looks very different for a neighborhood café with 500 fans than for a news publisher with half a million. That's why we analyzed 52 million Facebook posts across 213,000 accounts with over 6.9 billion engagements collectively, to see how engagement rates shift by follower tier.

Meta's Ime Archibong, once Mark Zuckerberg's jogging partner, makes the case for why creators should prioritize Facebook.

Some people like to keep it low-key. Others are eager to spark some open-ended conversations. The remaining love diving deep into the burning zone where statements uttered are so controversial they get the discussion sizzling in no time. And what for? Let's say if you have a burning unpopular opinion, you'd know why. And there's a safe corner of the internet known as the UnpopularOpinion subreddit that has had the most disputable points of view flowing since 2012.

"I think investors always have a bias to invest in things they themselves use and they undervalue things they don't use so there aren't many investors who are in college."

Fifteen years after The Social Network, Sorkin is set to write and direct The Social Network Part II, examining Facebook's controversial history and impact.