HOW quickly the allure of social media can curdle?

It is months since I dropped into my Facebook account and although I am still darkly loyal to the seething cesspit of Twitter, it too sees me less often.

For the first time in a few years I have ducked out of the familiar canter through the birthday pics of old friends, the round-up of rare soul events and ancient photos of people I knew when the photos weren’t ancient. I rarely spend more than half-an-hour a week on Facebook now, compared to three years ago when it was engrossing and ­addictive in equal measure.

This is not a retreat into technophobia, merely the weary recognition that it’s a fad that I can live without. At least Wordle claims it can delay dementia.

A few years ago, I remember enraging social media warriors by claiming that Facebook and Twitter were akin to the “Teasmade of Technology”, those once beloved bedside innovations that boiled a cup of tea whilst you roused awake.

Even my old mum was aware of the faddishness of society. I remember her consigning a Swan Bakelite Teasmade to a dark bedroom cupboard, after the bubbling water had woken her too early. I knew instantly that the device, like so many disposable goods was destined for the charity shop.

Maybe, just maybe, my cynical ­predictions are coming true and ­Facebook is about to be consigned to the past, like an old Now That’s What I Call Music LP. Or maybe it’s just been an unbelievably rough year in the stellar performance of social media’s biggest success story.

Last week saw a remarkable dent in Facebook’s once impregnable power. For the first time in its meteoric history, the social media giant saw a decline in ­users. Only a year ago this seemed a remote ­likelihood as Mark Zuckerberg’s giant ­defied logic, reaching capitalism’s ultimate nirvana – perpetual growth.

We know from recent history that ­social media can be briefly fashionable and then die a death, Friends Reunited and ­Myspace being two of the most ­obvious examples. It is not so long ago that ITV broadcast a reality documentary My Life Was Blighted By Friends ­Reunited, a ­saggy documentary about ­rising ­divorce rates as sad sacks rekindled school ­romances online.

Although Friends Reunited, Myspace and Bebo have hit the skids, few thought that such a devastating rot would set in at Facebook, but each passing day pings more bad news into Zuckerberg’s inbox.

Remember when the movie The Social Network was released in 2010, starring Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg and Jason Timberlake as the co-founder of Napster and Facebook’s first president? It all felt painfully hip and reached the big screen with the help of the tagline – “You Don’t Get 500 million friends without making a few enemies”.

The excitement around Facebook ­finally waned on the last Thursday of ­January, when Meta, the company ­formerly known as Facebook, suffered its biggest one-day wipe-out. Facebook’s ­parent stock plummeted 26% and its ­market value plunged by more than $230 billion.

Suddenly, all those charmless Wall Street tech investors, who were once ­portrayed as cutting-edge were exposed for what they really are, deeply traditional and hopelessly wedded to caution.

At the core of Meta’s collapse was a failure to convince institutional ­investors that they were still pioneers. Of late, ­Zuckerberg has come across as an ­unconvincing messenger when he tried to explain the corporation shift from ­social media to the so-called metaverse of ­virtual media.

According to the New York Times, “The salad days of Facebook’s wild user growth are over. Even though the ­company … ­recorded modest gains in new users across its so-called family of apps — which includes Instagram, Messenger and ­WhatsApp — its core Facebook social networking app lost about half a million users.”

And Facebook does not have its ­problems to seek. A new EU law now ­requires companies that gather user data within the European Union to keep and process that data only on European ­servers. Facebook’s and Instagram’s data, the core of its advertising income and the source of its market value, is mainly processed on US servers, and the EU is threatening their credibility in ­continental Europe.

Facebook's new name Meta has ­become something of a joke too. ­Cutting edge technologists complain that ­Zuckerberg was late to the metaverse ­party and his understanding of spatial computing and mixed reality is akin to Bruce Forsyth breakdancing. It is simply a different game and Facebook is ­suddenly dad at the disco.

Another commercial setback has been instigated by rivals Apple who have ­introduced app tracking transparency to their mobile phones, this in effect allows customers to choose whether Facebook or Instagram are allowed to monitor their online activities. Now that people can chose whether Facebook “follows” them around online as they look at books, ­holiday destinations and sports results ­allows a new degree of privacy, and many users have opted out.

You now have greater power over that mystifying advertising voodoo that seems to know you are looking for a new winter hoodie or a replacement toilet seat.

Another visible flaw in Facebook’s ­corporate narrative in the changed ­nature of global communication. We have grown up accepting the ­American model of ­corporate capitalism, that makes ­commercial brands like ­Coca-Cola, ­Kellogg’s Cornflakes and ­MacDonald’s burgers near universal consumer ­producers.

That pattern of consumption has ­unravelled with social media. Two of the biggest markets globally, India and China, are proving less susceptible to Facebook’s charms.

India has a population of 1.3 billion but an already well-developed indigenous software industry. Facebook’s market-share remains significant but it has been eaten away by local social media services like Sharechat, Koo and Chingari, India’s top three domestic alternatives. It is still in the race but no longer the stick-on ­favourite.

China is even more tricky, having ­effectively banned Facebook since 2009. Admittedly, there are ways of circumventing the ban by using VPN – virtual ­private networks – like Express, to disguise your location. Clever technology maybe, but this is precisely why it’s a barrier for many people.

Much has been made of Chinese ­refuseniks using Facebook to protest to the West about state repression, but the hidden story is that the vast majority of young Chinese teenagers and students are just as likely to be in love, go on ­adventures or hide their private life from their parents. They have many other ways of doing that with freely available ­Chinese apps. Facebook is not the necessity that many westerners imagine.

China has also placed another burden on Facebook by encouraging the global growth of Douyin a short-form video ­sharing app. Douyin first took off in East Asia and became an all-encompassing fad in South Korea. By 2017 it was the fastest growing media product in the innovative portfolio of the Shanghai-based company ByteDance. It is now universally known as TikTok.

DONALD Trump briefly threatened to ban TikTok in America fearful that it was outstripping American power but he fell from grace before the threats could ­materialise.

It is the fleeting parodies and charming nonsense on Tik Tok that fascinates the young, whilst their parents and even grandparents chose to remember the past on Facebook. In corporate presentations Zuckerberg has always enjoyed a story of growth and the will to talk ­demographics, knowing full well he is no longer the cool kid on the block and that Facebook feels to be cast in sepia like a nostalgic ­reminder of better days.

Facebook will survive, of course it will, but it faces a long and inevitable decline and the days when packed technology conferences sat in awe of Zuckerberg, are over.

The guru has some bad news to impart.