Despite reporting strong financial growth and making attempts to expand its offerings beyond social media, the platform came under increasing fire from several quarters for various reasons, among them allowing offensive content to flourish and facilitating the purchase of discriminatory advertisements.
And then there's the issue of trust. Rightly or not, Facebook has been saddled with a reputation for serving as a conduit for "fake news," a phrase that itself has increasingly lost real meaning over time.
Data from The Verge underscores Facebook's ongoing public perception troubles. In a survey of US internet users conducted in the fall of 2017 with the aid of Reticle Research, the level of trust engendered by Facebook trailed that of banks, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple. In fact, the only entity that Facebook outperformed in that regard was Twitter.
The Verge also reported that Facebook's level of popularity among its survey sample also lagged behind other large tech firms, including Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
In addition, only about one-quarter of respondents said they felt Facebook's News Feed was more interesting or relevant to them than one year ago.