U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

Note: personal opinion bellow

It seems to me that the overall interest in Facebook is decreasing. The social network hasn't had any interesting feature added to it in the last couple of years. It's becoming boring and boring, so that's why I believe people are leaving.

Still, Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition. We don't see any news about their user base decreasing and news channels don't seem to dislike them. Facebook is doing a good job making sure their biggest three platforms are seem as independent from one another, keeping Instagram and WhatsApp almost free from controversy.

Personally I see no loss for them here. Besides, they will promptly acquire any new players that look promising, or shamelessly copy them as they did with Snapchat.

WhatsApp isn't at all free from controversy - it's had its share of "terror attack orchestrated by WhatsApp [and therefore it's some how to blame]" stories.

What's saved it, IMO, is the similar deluge of stories about political in-fighting taking place in WhatsApp groups.

The available conclusions to the reader of the two angles on it are: 1) politicians are organising terror attacks; 2) there is no causal relationship between WhatsApp and terror attacks

... one of which seems eminently more reasonable than the other; so thankfully that's where we are.

Amusingly it also came under fire from politicians in the opposite direction in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal: far from wanting to peek at end-to-end encrypted data (as called for whenever it's used by terror groups) they then wanted assurances that the data hadn't been snooped on or passed to third-parties!