Almost A Third Of Canadians Say Facebook Has Made Their Lives Suck More, A New Poll Says

And a few Canadians say last week's outage has made them rethink their social media usage!

Staff Writer

It might have been the Facebook outage that shook the world, too many pokes from random people or something else entirely, but almost a third of Canadians surveyed in a recent poll said Facebook has made their quality of life worse.

According to a poll conducted by Leger, 29% of the Canadians who responded said the social media platform has negatively affected their quality of life, while others said the recent outage is making them rethink their social media usage in general.

Of the 1,545 Canadians surveyed, 46% said they hadn't noticed any impact on their quality of life by Facebook and 25% said they thought Facebook made their life better.

The poll also asked Canadians about their views on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger (the four apps that went down in last week's outage) and Facebook got the worst ratings by far. Leger reports that 40% of Canadians said they have a negative opinion of the platform, compared to 15% for Messenger, 20% for WhatsApp and 27% for Instagram.

After the panic (and memes) of last week's outage across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, 18% of Canadians aged 18 to 34 said they'd reflected on their social media usage and would change it going forward. But the majority of respondents weren't shaken up too badly; 66% of Canadians said it was business as usual after the outage and it wouldn't affect their online presence.

  • Cormac O'Brien was an Associate Editor at Narcity Canada, covering all things exciting and trending about Canada. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Journalism from the University of Victoria, where he served as the Editor-in-Chief of the campus newspaper and was awarded the BCYNA Community News Scholarship for his writing. He was also the producer and co-host of Now On Narcity, Narcity's flagship podcast.
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