How will Mark Zuckerberg stop the next generation walking away from Facebook?

Facebook’s annual F8 get together for developers is currently taking place in California, and the company wants you to know that it really, really, cares about your privacy.

During his keynote address on Tuesday, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the company’s revamped look – it’s not even going to be blue anymore! – and discussed its new emphasis on groups. He said he wanted “to make communities as central as friends” to the service. Essentially, this means that users will be pushed into communicating with select groups of people instead of in their timeline as a whole. (Google actually tried something similar to this with its now-defunct Google Plus social network, and the functionality was, initially at least, well received.) But the central theme was privacy. Facebook is going to protect us better. Promise.

Zuckerberg made his bid for users’ trust whilst standing with the phrase ‘The future is private’ emblazoned on the wall behind him. It was hardly subtle. It wasn’t meant to be. Facebook wants you to know this is a new era for the company

The problem, though, is that the future is not private. The present is. And Facebook is well behind the curve.

Younger users now may gorge on pictures shared on Facebook-owned Instagram, particularly via the stories feature in which pictures disappear after 24 hours, but they are spending significantly reduced time on Facebook itself. It is becoming less and less relevant to them, and that is terrifying for Zuckerberg and co.

This younger generation may document every moment, but they clearly also want to control who sees what they post and how long it is publicly available. They use WhatsApp, which Facebook also owns, and other private messaging services. In May 2018, the Pew Research Center found that 51% of U.S. teens aged between 13 and 17 said they use Facebook compared to YouTube (85%) Instagram (72%) and Snapchat (69%).

Facebook simply is not the go-to social network for them in the way it once was. It is not the network they use to communicate quickly with their friends. It’s the platform their older siblings, or, horror, their parents, use to share slightly embarrassing quips and pictures.

Building trust with younger users seems to be a part of the reason why Facebook is going all-in on privacy. Even, before Tuesday’s pitch, it had decided to integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. The company promised that the end-to-end encryption offered by WhatsApp will remain for the new combined service.

Have no doubt this is a business decision, not a moral one. Facebook needs to prove it can offer what its competitors are. It needs to develop a compelling offer for tomorrow’s consumers. However, it is going to take a lot of convincing for users to believe Zuckerberg has gone from the guy who wanted us to share everything, and made billions from us doing it, to a privacy advocate.

The future isn’t private. The present is.

Before we write the obituaries to Facebook, we need to be clear that it still dominates social media. Earlier this month Pew’s updated research earlier this month found that 76% of US 18-to-24-year-olds, and over 80% of 25-to-29-year-olds, had used Facebook. This was only beaten by YouTube. However, Instagram and Snapchat were not far behind, on 75% and 73% respectively.

Lots of us need to use Facebook for work or communicating with friends and family abroad. It’s not going anywhere for the foreseeable future. But to maintain its dominant position, particularly for the next generation of users, Facebook needs to create products that are relevant and have users trust it.

This is an uphill battle. When Zuckerberg declared on Tuesday that he “get[‘s] that a lot of people aren’t sure that we’re serious about this. I know that we don’t exactly have the strongest reputation when it comes to privacy right now, to put it lightly,” he was met with silence. The attempt at a joke fell flat. That moment clanged so badly because it is impossible to believe that the dorm-room project that rose to become a multi-billion dollar company on the back of all our data can really change.

“At the end of the day, this isn’t just about building some new products,” Zuckerberg tried to convince his audience, but “a major shift in how we run this company.” This reminds me of his approach to tackling fake news. As I noted when the company turned 15, Facebook talks a good game, but it has done very little to live up to it. The same is true with privacy.

Given all the recent revelations, few have the faith that Facebook can make the shift.