Scandal around the surveillance of ordinary citizens, which was boosted thanks to American whistleblower Edward Snowden, has hit on social networks. More and more people delete their pages in Facebook, and it has triggered the domino effect: a user, who has deleted his account, is followed by his friends. Representatives of the resources do not advertise this trend; that is why there are no precise data about these «losses». But independent experts are confident: a mass flight is yet to come.

Once, a Facebook account was evidence of an Internet user’s advancement, now it mostly reminds about his dependency. Millions of people around the world post gigabytes of often useless information on their pages. Instead of communicating with friends in a restaurant, people, speaking the language of Facebook, “check in” there, that allows everyone in their friend-list to learn about the location of the user. However, many experts conclude that fans of «life for show» are getting scarce. And not a small role was played here by the recent scandal, in the center of which was the former CIA officer Edward Snowden, member of the Public Chamber of Russia, blogger Anton Korobkov-Zemlyansky says:

“Information that came to light that the U.S. intelligence services were spying upon all users of the Internet, of course, has an impact on many people. And a flight from social networks takes place. If we are talking about the entire audience of Facebook, than it’s a fraction of a percent, and against the general background it is just unnoticeable. Although, of course, if we speak in absolute figures, then the flight from the Internet of several million people is a quite significant figure”.

Among other causes of refusal from participation in social networks experts name users’ fatigue from spam, advertising and domination of politics. Meanwhile, it is too early to speak about the loss of popularity of Facebook. Rather, a migration of users is underway as they switch from one resource to another, CEO of the sites development company “Strateg” Ekaterina Aksenova says:

“Of course, there is a limit to Facebook, and one day this service will be replaced by another one. Formerly it looked like a huge and firm service, now it is «shifting», because users are very fickle. But in the coming years, Facebook will not suffer any substantial damage from the outflow of users”.

They do not comment on conversations «about losses» in Facebook and do not provide specific figures. Answering journalists’ questions, the company made a standard statement having expressed gratitude for the fact that “more than one billion users, including a huge number of young people, use the social network for contacts and exchange of information”. But results of the influential American company Piper Jaffray & Co’s research cast doubt on such a positive assessment. According to the obtained data, during the last year, interest of teenagers to Facebook decreased by 10 percent – from 33 to 23 %. And hence there is a cause for concern for the management of the company.