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How the Facebook babies became the TikTok teens

As Facebook turns 20, the babies who once pervaded its news feed barely use the platform now.
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Updated 02 February 2024
Zaira Lakhpatwala
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How the Facebook babies became the TikTok teens

  • As Facebook turns 20, so are many of the toddlers who pervaded its news feed
Updated 02 February 2024
Zaira Lakhpatwala

DUBAI: “My parents like photography and when the digital age came, they shifted from photobooks to Facebook,” 23-year-old Dubai resident Alexandra Morata told Arab News.

Morata, like many her age and younger, grew up to find out that their parents had been posting pictures of them — including of their awkward teenage years — on Facebook.

The phenomenon was so common that there is a term for it: sharenting.

A paper written by child development experts defines sharenting as “the practice of parents, caregivers or relatives sharing information about their children (underage) online, typically on some online platforms.”

A massive 80 percent of children had an online presence before they were 2 years old, according to a 2010 study by online security firm AVG.

The presence of baby pictures on the news feed was seemingly so pervasive that in 2013 a browser extension called UnBaby.me was created to auto-detect baby images and replace them with others, including of cats.

As Facebook turns 20, the babies who once pervaded its news feed barely use the platform now.

Teenagers spent nearly two hours on TikTok every day, compared to just one minute on Facebook and 16 minutes on Instagram, according to a 2022 study.

Morata and Aily Prasetyo, 24, both said they have shifted to other platforms like Instagram and TikTok partly due to their friends not being on Facebook anymore, and also because “Facebook was so populated with … old people,” said Prasetyo.

“Facebook is a platform for millennials and baby boomers while TikTok is more for a younger audience and is known for its emphasis on authentic videos rather than ones that are overly sales oriented,” Nimrah Khan, founder of digital marketing agency Kollab Digital, told Arab News.

Those considered Generation Z are overwhelmingly embracing TikTok. It was the top platform of choice for Gen Zs overtaking YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat, according to a study last year by research firm YPulse.

Globally, seven of the top 10 countries for TikTok, by reach, are in the Middle East North Africa region, according to “Social Media in the Middle East 2022: A Year in Review” published by the University of Oregon-UNESCO Crossings Institute.

TikTok even overtook online giant Google in 2021 as the most popular website of the year, according to internet security company Cloudflare.

Khan has a warning though: “TikTok’s algorithmic recommendations can expose users, including teenagers, to inappropriate content or potential privacy risks based on their browsing history and interactions on the platform.”

Still, many youngsters remain open to sharing their lives online because they, in large part, understand the security risks of living a digital life.

Morata, for example, said that she does not have any privacy concerns around the pictures her parents shared of her childhood because they had private profiles. The conversations around online safety have made her more aware of the risks, and so, she is careful with her accounts, she added.

Social media “can be detrimental to mental health,” but it has become such a common topic of conversation that most older teens are aware of what is fake and what is not, especially as influencers have started becoming more authentic, said Prasetyo.

Despite that awareness, social media platforms can have dangerous effects on youngsters’ mental health.

Cam Barrett, who is now in her early twenties had her personal life — from bath photos to the fact that she was adopted — shared publicly on Facebook by her mother. It is a habit she inculcated too, sharing much of her life publicly, when she opened a Twitter account, she told The Atlantic.

But last year, Barrett was among the people who advocated for children’s internet privacy.

“Today is the first time that I’ve introduced myself with my legal name in three years because I’m terrified to share my name because the digital footprint I had no control over ... exists,” she said testifying in front of the Washington State House last year.

The testimony was to support a bill that aims to ensure that children who are heavily featured in influencers’ online content have a right to financial compensation for their work and to maintain their privacy.

“I know firsthand what it’s like to not have a choice in the digital footprint you didn’t create that follows you around for the rest of your life with no option for it to be removed,” Barrett said.

The bill is the brainchild of Chris McCarty, a student at the University of Washington, who was inspired by the 2020 case of Huxley Stauffer, a toddler with special needs adopted from China by family vloggers Myka and James Stauffer.

The couple made and monetized extensive content about Huxley and his adoption, before giving him up because they realized they were not equipped to take care of him.

In 2021, whistleblower and former product manager at Facebook, Frances Haugen, leaked thousands of internal documents detailing how the company knew its apps helped spread divisive content and harmed the mental health of some young users.

Top bosses from all major social media companies have been called on for answers by lawmakers around the world.

On Wednesday this week, CEOs from Meta, TikTok, and other companies were grilled by US lawmakers over the dangers that children and teens face using social media platforms.

“They’re responsible for many of the dangers our children face online,” said US Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, and chair of the committee, during his opening remarks.

He added: “Their design choices, their failures to adequately invest in trust and safety, their constant pursuit of engagement and profit over basic safety have all put our kids and grandkids at risk.”

The hearing marked TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew’s second appearance before the US Congress, since March 2023, when he was questioned about the growing influence of TikTok on young people’s mental health, among other concerns.

 

Topics: TikTok Facebook Meta

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Aimed at the growing number of young Chinese who live alone, a new app asks: ‘Are you dead?’

Updated 15 sec ago
AP
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Aimed at the growing number of young Chinese who live alone, a new app asks: ‘Are you dead?’

  • In China, the names of things are often either ornately poetic or stunningly direct
  • A new, wildly popular app among young Chinese people is definitively the latter
Updated 15 sec ago
AP
BEIJING: In China, the names of things are often either ornately poetic or jarringly direct. A new, wildly popular app among young Chinese people is definitively the latter.
It’s called, simply, “Are You Dead?“
In a vast country whose young people are increasingly on the move, the new, one-button app — which has taken the country by digital storm this month — is essentially exactly what it says it is. People who live alone in far-off cities and may be at risk — or just perceived as such by friends or relatives — can push an outsized green circle on their phone screens and send proof of life over the network to a friend or loved one. The cost: 8 yuan (about $1.10).
It’s simple and straightforward — essentially a 21st-century Chinese digital version of those American pendants with an alert button on them for senior citizens that gave birth to the famed TV commercial: “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!”
Developed by three young people in their 20s, “Are You Dead?” became the most downloaded paid app on the Apple App Store in China last week, according to local media reports. It is also becoming a top download in places as diverse as Singapore and the Netherlands, Britain and India and the United States — in line with the developers’ attitude that loneliness and safety aren’t just Chinese issues.
“Every country has young people who move to big cities to chase their dreams,” Ian Lü, 29, one of the app’s developers, said Thursday.
Lü, who worked and lived alone in the southern city of Shenzhen for five years, experienced such loneliness himself. He said the need for a frictionless check-in is especially strong among introverts. “It’s unrealistic,” he said, “to message people every day just to tell them you’re still alive.”
A reflection of life in modern China
Against the backdrop of modern and increasingly frenetic Chinese life, the market for the app is understandable.
Traditionally, Chinese families have tended to live together or at least in close proximity across generations — something embedded deep in the nation’s culture until recent years. That has changed in the last few decades with urbanization and rapid economic growth that have sent many Chinese to join what is effectively a diaspora within their own nation — and taken hundreds of millions far from parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.
Today, the country has more than 100 million households with only one person, according to an annual report from the National Bureau of Statistics of China in 2024.
Consider Chen Xingyu, 32, who has lived on her own for years in Kunming, the capital of southern China’s Yunnan province. “It is new and funny. The name ‘Are You Dead?’ is very interesting,” Chen said.
Chen, a “lying flat” practitioner who has rejected the grueling, fast-paced career of many in her age group, would try the app but worries about data security. “Assuming many who want to try are women users, if information of such detail about users gets leaked, that’d be terrible,” she said.
Yuan Sangsang, a Shanghai designer, has been living on her own for a decade and describes herself as a “single cow and horse.” She’s not hoping the app will save her life — only help her relatives in the event that she does, in fact, expire alone.
“I just don’t want to die with no dignity, like the body gets rotten and smelly before it is found,” said Yuan, 38. “That would be unfair for the ones who have to deal with it.”
Is the app tapping into a particular angst?
While such an app might at first seem best suited to elderly people — regardless of their smartphone literacy — all reports indicate that “Are You Dead?” is being snapped up by younger people as the wry equivalent of a social media check-in.
“Some netizens say that the ‘Are you dead?’ greeting feels like a carefree joke between close friends — both heartfelt and gives a sense of unguarded ease,” the business website Yicai, the Chinese Business Network, said in a commentary. ““It likely explains why so many young people unanimously like this app.”
The commentary, by writer He Tao, went further in analyzing the cultural landscape. He wrote that the app’s immediate success “serves as a darkly humorous social metaphor, reminding us to pay attention to the living conditions and inner world of contemporary young people. Those who downloaded it clearly need more than just a functional security measure; they crave a signal of being seen and understood.”
That name, though.
Death is a taboo subject in Chinese culture, and the word itself is shunned to the point where many buildings in China have no fourth floor because the word for “four” and the word for “death” sound the same — “si.” Lü acknowledged that the app’s name sparked public pressure.
“Death is an issue every one of us has to face,” he said. “Only when you truly understand death do you start thinking about how long you can exist in this world, and how you want to realize the value of your life.”
A few days ago, though, the developers said on their official account on China’s Weibo social platform that they’d pivot to a new name. Their choice: the more cryptic “Demumu,” which they said they hoped could “serve more solo dwellers globally.”
Then, a twist: Late Wednesday, the app team posted on its Weibo account that workshopping the name Demumu didn’t turn out “as well as expected.” The app team is offering a reward for whoever offers a new name that will be picked this weekend. Lü said more than 10,000 people have weighed in.
The reward for the new moniker: $96 — or, in China, 666 yuan.

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