Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed a decline in time spent on Facebook and Instagram, marking a notable shift in user behavior that reflects broader changes in the social media landscape. The admission came during his testimony in an ongoing federal antitrust case brought by the Federal Trade Commission, which is scrutinizing Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
“Facebook’s and Instagram’s share of the amount of time people spend on social media apps has ‘gone down meaningfully,’” Zuckerberg said in court, adding that “a lot of the interaction” has shifted to messaging platforms. While Meta has long acknowledged the rise of private messaging, this is one of the few times the company has publicly admitted to decreased engagement across its core platforms.
Historically, Meta frequently touted user engagement metrics. In 2016, the company reported that people were spending more than 50 minutes per day on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger combined. Since then, it has largely stopped releasing those figures. External estimates now indicate that TikTok users in the U.S. spend an average of 108 minutes per day on the app, compared to 63 minutes on Facebook and just 48 on Instagram, according to data from Guggenheim Partners.
The drop comes despite efforts to drive engagement through AI-driven content recommendations like Reels. While Meta still commands billions of users globally, these trends suggest the platform’s influence on user attention may be waning. Zuckerberg also revealed that at one point he considered resetting users’ social graphs to reenergize Facebook’s experience – an idea that, though shelved, highlights internal concerns about relevance and user fatigue.
