Stories About Facebook Are Boring Everybody. How Perfectly On Brand.

Facebook has been big news lately, whether you’re looking at politics, the tech industry, tech industry politics, or the politics industry. But not as much if you’re looking at metrics like whether people are interested in reading about Facebook.

Under the decent tagline “Facebook fatigue,” Axios reported this morning on the diminishing interest online news consumers have in stories related to the tech giant. People increasingly don’t want to hear about or read about the company. So naturally I decided to write about it.

The case made by Axios is convincing, inasmuch as one needs to be convinced that they aren’t interested in something. Citing data from Newswhip, reporters Neal Rothschild and Sara Fischer write that the “Facebook Papers” story hasn’t resulted in “very big spikes, even temporary ones” in interest, and that where there is big engagement, it tends to be because of ex-president Donald Trump.

Just to say that again for the Mark Zuckerbergs in the back, the biggest stories about Facebook aren’t about Facebook, they’re about that other guy.

On the subject of those “Facebook papers” that captured the full attention of everyone with a blue check and blue chips (or at least the attention of people who write for that audience), Axios lists two more bullet points.

• Google Trends data show a similar decline in Google searches for Facebook over the past year — and the biggest spike in Google searches in over a year happened when Facebook experienced an outage last month.

• The WSJ’s most-engaged story from its Facebook investigations (Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show) ranked 48th in social media interactions among all of the publication’s stories since March, according to NewsWhip data.

Oy. So in addition to Trump stories, people were engaged on news about Facebook crashing. And the biggest news story to come out of the scandal that rocked journo Twitter hit just 48th among all the stories the Wall Street Journal put on social media.

The trend toward “boomer” on Facebook has been talked about for years. In a recent poll of youths who are my daughters, 100% found that most of what they see on Facebook is boring, old news, or “old people news.”

Conservative activists and politicians are frequently incensed at Facebook over issues of limiting access or exposure, and banning of people, groups, or content. Liberals are frequently incensed at Facebook over there not being enough of those practices. The government can’t get enough of holding hearings about the company, and political and tech reporters can’t stop writing about all those things.

But it seems everyone else finds stories about the social network as boring as millennials and zoomers find the content shared on it.

Very Meta. And a great example of how the outsize influence of mutual follow circles on that other social giant can skew the story selection in the mainstream media. Or even at a website that writes about the media.