Why teens are leaving Facebook: It’s ‘meaningless’

Teens are leaving Facebook in droves for new friends like Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter -- at an estimated rate of up to a million a year. It might seem like no big deal to a service that boasts over 1 billion users and counting, but teens tend to be bellwethers of trends. Early adopters of Instagram, they saw that it was more than just a cool filter for your phone before the rest of us caught up.

David Ebersman, the former chief financial officer for Facebook, argued that the reason was that Facebook was no longer the hip hangout spot on the Internet for teenagers, and there’s a simple reason for that: It’s hard to look cool when you’re hanging out with Mom and Dad. The social media service is highly popular among their Gen X and Baby Boomer parents -- who, as Bustle’s Krystin Arneson writes, “came to keep an eye on their kids, but stayed when they discovered that connecting with other adults was fun.” With widespread parental supervision on the service, many teenagers prefer the anonymity of Whisper, the iPhone era’s version of PostSecret.