Meta’s Reinvention Plan: Can Facebook Survive Gen Z or Is It Already Too Late?

When the next generation just doesn’t care about a product, a certain kind of silence descends upon it. Not animosity. Don’t object. Just apathy, like the construction of a new road around an old town, or a quiet detour. That is essentially the issue that Facebook has been dealing with for several years. The platform that used to feel like the internet itself—the first thing you checked in the morning from your office cubicle or dorm room—has evolved into something that a sizable percentage of people under 25 primarily associate with their parents’ generation. For the biggest social network in the world, that is an uncomfortable position.

At the very least, Mark Zuckerberg has never been very adept at acting as though a problem doesn’t exist. Fundamentally, Facebook Inc.’s October 2021 rebranding to Meta was an admission that the company needed a bigger story, one that could contain its aspirations beyond a platform whose cultural moment had either passed or at least plateaued. The subsequent metaverse wager was costly and, to be honest, premature. In 2023 alone, Meta‘s VR and augmented reality hardware division, Reality Labs, lost more than $16 billion. The headsets were shipped. The virtual offices were empty. The idea of using cartoon avatars to conduct meetings did not take off as quickly as Zuckerberg had anticipated.

AI is what has gained popularity, and Meta has been actively pursuing it ever since. By virtue of its current user base, the company’s Meta AI assistant is one of the most widely used AI products on the planet, having been integrated into Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Reading between the lines of Zuckerberg’s public remarks, there’s a feeling within the company that AI is now the reinvention story—the thing that gives Meta a credible response when analysts ask what comes next. The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which let users play music, take pictures, and communicate with the AI assistant by speaking, have sold better than most observers anticipated. More than the Quest headset in most social situations, they are a real product worn by real people.

However, none of this directly addresses the issue facing Generation Z. The problem isn’t that young people don’t trust Meta’s AI assistant or don’t like its hardware. Facebook’s social features, such as the feed, wall, events page, and groups, seem to have been created for a different era of online behavior. TikTok developed a discovery engine that doesn’t even need a social graph. TikTok can amuse you within thirty seconds of opening the app, even if you don’t know anyone. Although Instagram, which Meta owns and has actively promoted, has done better with younger audiences, its development into an influencer economy and shopping platform has caused conflict with users who desired something less curated and more personal. Meta’s response to X, Threads, has amassed a user base but hasn’t yet established its true purpose.

It’s difficult to ignore the fact that Meta’s strongest numbers still stem from an aging core. Facebook’s monthly active user base worldwide has remained remarkably steady at about 3 billion, but that number conceals substantial variation in the demographic weight and quality of engagement. Reaching people in their twenties is very important to advertisers, who ultimately decide whether any of this matters financially. This is the age group that forms habits, makes first purchases, and develops brand loyalty. Regardless of the total number of users, it is more difficult to sell a platform where those users arrive grudgingly, if at all.

Meta is making an ambitious attempt to shift its focus from social networks to social infrastructure. The wager is that Instagram’s visual culture, WhatsApp’s dominance in messaging, and the AI assistant that permeates everything could come together to create something more memorable than any one app. Additionally, Zuckerberg has hinted at AI-generated social profiles, or artificial personas that users can interact with. This could be an intriguing social design experiment or an indication that the company has run out of human interaction. Maybe both. It’s still unclear if adding AI characters to a platform is a way to combat loneliness or if it’s just an extremely advanced simulation of it.

MySpace, a once-dominant social platform that lost its cultural footing so quickly that the decline felt almost instantaneous in retrospect, is the historical parallel that keeps coming up in discussions about Meta. Compared to MySpace, Meta is far bigger, far more profitable, and far more diverse. The comparison isn’t entirely accurate. However, the underlying dynamic—a generation gradually and then suddenly deciding that a platform belongs to someone else—is real enough to be taken seriously.

Holding two things in tension at the same time is necessary to watch Meta navigate this moment. With resources that enable it to absorb failed experiments and continue growing, the company is truly large and truly adaptable. However, size and wealth do not always translate into cultural relevance, and Facebook is having a hard time regaining cultural relevance with the 16–26 age group. The plan for reinvention is genuine. A product launch or an earnings call won’t address the question of whether it reaches the target audience.