Everyone has a take on Facebook’s decline. It shows up in strategy decks, conference panels, casual Slack messages between marketing teams who’ve already mentally moved on. The narrative is so well-worn it barely needs saying: Facebook is the platform your parents use. TikTok is where culture lives now. Instagram is where aesthetics happen. Facebook is…nostalgic, at best.
There’s just one problem with that story. It’s not what the data shows.
The Loudest Conversations On the Internet are Still Happening Here
Respondology reviewed 168.8 million comments across social platforms in 2025. Facebook accounted for 78.2 million of them, 46.3% of the total. Meta platforms combined drove 85% of all comment volume across the dataset.
Let that sit for a second. Nearly half of all social commentary, across every major platform, is happening on a channel that most marketers have written off as a legacy play.
TikTok, for all its explosive growth (and 179% comment volume growth year-over-year is genuinely explosive), generated 20.3 million comments in Respondology’s dataset during the same period. That’s impressive. It’s also less than a third of the Facebook comments in that same dataset, which represents hundreds of brands across sports, entertainment, retail, and consumer categories.
The paid picture adds another layer. Respondology analyzed $647.6 million in ad spend across Meta and TikTok in 2025. TikTok Ads had a hide rate of 38%. Meta Ads came in at 34%. Both platforms are running nearly twice the toxicity of their organic environments, meaning the comments accumulating beneath the content brands are paying the most to promote are also the most likely to contain spam, fraud, and content that drives purchase intent down. Paid reach and comment risk are scaling together, and most brands are only tracking one of them.
The Scroll That Matters
All of that conversation volume means something specific. It’s not just people sharing posts or tagging friends. A significant portion of it is evaluation. Pre-purchase research happening in public, beneath content that brands spent real money to create and promote.
When someone sees your ad, your post, or your sponsored content, their next move is almost never to buy. It’s to look around. To see what other people think. To find the version of your brand that hasn’t been polished by a creative team.
They scroll to the comments.
68% of consumers read comments before making a purchase decision. Not reviews on a separate site. Not a Google search. The comments. Right there, beneath the post they just saw.
Which means your comment section isn’t below your content. It is your content, for the portion of your audience that matters most: the ones who are close to making a decision and want one more signal before they do
The Floor Dropped Out, and Most Brands Don’t Realize It Yet
Early 2025 brought a shift that didn’t get nearly enough attention in marketing circles, which is remarkable given how much it changed the operating reality for brands on the world’s largest comment platform.
Meta announced significant rollbacks to its native moderation capabilities at the start of the year. The stated framing was about reducing censorship and giving communities more control. The practical effect was something different: the systems that had been quietly catching and filtering harmful content in comment sections were pulled back, and the responsibility for what now lives beneath brand content shifted decisively to brands themselves.
This wasn’t a gradual transition. It landed while comment volume was still climbing. According to Respondology’s data, Facebook’s organic hide rate rose 26.8% year-over-year. Instagram’s climbed 33%. Meta platforms collectively saw hide rates increase 27.3%. The content that needed managing didn’t decrease because the platform stepped back. It increased, and the tooling brands had been relying on was no longer doing the work it once was.
For brands running paid campaigns, the exposure is sharper still. Paid comment environments are already nearly twice as toxic as organic ones. Spam, fraud links, counterfeit sellers, and coordinated bot activity tend to concentrate where the audience is largest and most purchase-ready. That’s exactly where your ad spend is pointing people.
What this moment requires isn’t panic, but it does require a decision. Meta stepping back from moderation doesn’t mean the comment section moderates itself. It means the default outcome, if brands do nothing, is an unmanaged environment sitting directly beneath content they’re actively paying to amplify. The brands navigating this well have stopped waiting for the platform to handle it and built their own always-on systems to do what Meta no longer will.
Today, roughly 20% of comments contain spam, bots, or abuse. And 47% of consumers say they associate toxic comments with the brand itself, not with bad actors who happened to show up uninvited.
That last number is the one that should change how you think about this. Consumers aren’t making a careful distinction between your content and the chaos beneath it. They’re forming one impression of the whole thing. The post, the comments, the silence from your team, all of it registers as a single experience of your brand.
The Gap Hiding in Plain Sight
Only 3% of comments receive a response from brands.
That means when someone asks a real question, expresses genuine purchase intent, or shows up with a complaint that could be turned around, the overwhelming odds are that your brand isn’t there. The question sits unanswered, and the moment passes.
This isn’t indifference. Social teams are stretched, the volume is relentless, and manual processes were never built for this scale. But the cost is real. Brands that do engage see a 78% increase in likelihood of purchase following a positive interaction. Customers who get a response spend 20–40% more on average. Consistent moderation and engagement lift overall sentiment by more than 26% over a year.
The opportunity isn’t small. The gap between where most brands are and where they could be is just unusually wide.
Your Comments Are Now Training Data
There’s one more shift worth paying attention to, and it’s moving faster than most marketing teams have noticed.
Facebook is the single largest source of public brand commentary on the internet. That’s not an opinion, it’s what the data shows. And increasingly, that commentary isn’t just being read by the people who scroll past it. It’s being ingested by AI tools.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews and others are synthesizing public conversations to generate answers about your brand. When someone asks an AI assistant about your brand, whether your brand is trustworthy, what customers think of your products, or whether your company handles complaints well, the answer is being assembled from what’s publicly visible. That includes your Facebook comment sections. The tone of your community, the recurring complaints, the praise that does or doesn’t show up, all of it is feeding into how AI describes your brand when someone asks about it.
Given that Facebook generates nearly half of all social comment volume in Respondology’s dataset, the exposure here is proportional. More comments means more signal. More signal means more influence over the narrative that AI systems learn from and repeat.
What lives in your Facebook comments today doesn’t just influence the person reading it tonight. It shapes how your brand gets characterized tomorrow, next month, potentially for years. Unmoderated toxicity doesn’t stay beneath the post. It migrates into the searchable record of who you are, and gets served back to people who never saw the original content at all.
What This Actually Changes
Facebook’s relevance didn’t disappear. The way it creates value shifted, away from reach as the primary metric, toward the quality of the conversation happening around your content.
The brands doing this well in 2026 aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest teams or the largest budgets. They’re the ones who stopped treating comment sections as a byproduct of content and started treating them as infrastructure. They moderate around the clock, because 67% of comments come in outside business hours. They respond to high-intent signals first. They audit what AI says about them quarterly, because they understand their comments are now part of their discovery footprint.
The platform didn’t die. The value just moved somewhere most people forgot to look.
It’s sitting right below the post.
Facebook isn’t Dead, The Comments Are Now the Metric to Measure There
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Everyone has a take on Facebook’s decline. It shows up in strategy decks, conference panels, casual Slack messages between marketing teams who’ve already mentally moved on. The narrative is so well-worn it barely needs saying: Facebook is the platform your parents use. TikTok is where culture lives now. Instagram is where aesthetics happen. Facebook is…nostalgic, at best.
There’s just one problem with that story. It’s not what the data shows.
The Loudest Conversations On the Internet are Still Happening Here
Respondology reviewed 168.8 million comments across social platforms in 2025. Facebook accounted for 78.2 million of them, 46.3% of the total. Meta platforms combined drove 85% of all comment volume across the dataset.
Let that sit for a second. Nearly half of all social commentary, across every major platform, is happening on a channel that most marketers have written off as a legacy play.
TikTok, for all its explosive growth (and 179% comment volume growth year-over-year is genuinely explosive), generated 20.3 million comments in Respondology’s dataset during the same period. That’s impressive. It’s also less than a third of the Facebook comments in that same dataset, which represents hundreds of brands across sports, entertainment, retail, and consumer categories.
The paid picture adds another layer. Respondology analyzed $647.6 million in ad spend across Meta and TikTok in 2025. TikTok Ads had a hide rate of 38%. Meta Ads came in at 34%. Both platforms are running nearly twice the toxicity of their organic environments, meaning the comments accumulating beneath the content brands are paying the most to promote are also the most likely to contain spam, fraud, and content that drives purchase intent down. Paid reach and comment risk are scaling together, and most brands are only tracking one of them.
The Scroll That Matters
All of that conversation volume means something specific. It’s not just people sharing posts or tagging friends. A significant portion of it is evaluation. Pre-purchase research happening in public, beneath content that brands spent real money to create and promote.
When someone sees your ad, your post, or your sponsored content, their next move is almost never to buy. It’s to look around. To see what other people think. To find the version of your brand that hasn’t been polished by a creative team.
They scroll to the comments.
68% of consumers read comments before making a purchase decision. Not reviews on a separate site. Not a Google search. The comments. Right there, beneath the post they just saw.
Which means your comment section isn’t below your content. It is your content, for the portion of your audience that matters most: the ones who are close to making a decision and want one more signal before they do
The Floor Dropped Out, and Most Brands Don’t Realize It Yet
Early 2025 brought a shift that didn’t get nearly enough attention in marketing circles, which is remarkable given how much it changed the operating reality for brands on the world’s largest comment platform.
Meta announced significant rollbacks to its native moderation capabilities at the start of the year. The stated framing was about reducing censorship and giving communities more control. The practical effect was something different: the systems that had been quietly catching and filtering harmful content in comment sections were pulled back, and the responsibility for what now lives beneath brand content shifted decisively to brands themselves.
This wasn’t a gradual transition. It landed while comment volume was still climbing. According to Respondology’s data, Facebook’s organic hide rate rose 26.8% year-over-year. Instagram’s climbed 33%. Meta platforms collectively saw hide rates increase 27.3%. The content that needed managing didn’t decrease because the platform stepped back. It increased, and the tooling brands had been relying on was no longer doing the work it once was.
For brands running paid campaigns, the exposure is sharper still. Paid comment environments are already nearly twice as toxic as organic ones. Spam, fraud links, counterfeit sellers, and coordinated bot activity tend to concentrate where the audience is largest and most purchase-ready. That’s exactly where your ad spend is pointing people.
What this moment requires isn’t panic, but it does require a decision. Meta stepping back from moderation doesn’t mean the comment section moderates itself. It means the default outcome, if brands do nothing, is an unmanaged environment sitting directly beneath content they’re actively paying to amplify. The brands navigating this well have stopped waiting for the platform to handle it and built their own always-on systems to do what Meta no longer will.
Today, roughly 20% of comments contain spam, bots, or abuse. And 47% of consumers say they associate toxic comments with the brand itself, not with bad actors who happened to show up uninvited.
That last number is the one that should change how you think about this. Consumers aren’t making a careful distinction between your content and the chaos beneath it. They’re forming one impression of the whole thing. The post, the comments, the silence from your team, all of it registers as a single experience of your brand.
The Gap Hiding in Plain Sight
Only 3% of comments receive a response from brands.
That means when someone asks a real question, expresses genuine purchase intent, or shows up with a complaint that could be turned around, the overwhelming odds are that your brand isn’t there. The question sits unanswered, and the moment passes.
This isn’t indifference. Social teams are stretched, the volume is relentless, and manual processes were never built for this scale. But the cost is real. Brands that do engage see a 78% increase in likelihood of purchase following a positive interaction. Customers who get a response spend 20–40% more on average. Consistent moderation and engagement lift overall sentiment by more than 26% over a year.
The opportunity isn’t small. The gap between where most brands are and where they could be is just unusually wide.
Your Comments Are Now Training Data
There’s one more shift worth paying attention to, and it’s moving faster than most marketing teams have noticed.
Facebook is the single largest source of public brand commentary on the internet. That’s not an opinion, it’s what the data shows. And increasingly, that commentary isn’t just being read by the people who scroll past it. It’s being ingested by AI tools.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews and others are synthesizing public conversations to generate answers about your brand. When someone asks an AI assistant about your brand, whether your brand is trustworthy, what customers think of your products, or whether your company handles complaints well, the answer is being assembled from what’s publicly visible. That includes your Facebook comment sections. The tone of your community, the recurring complaints, the praise that does or doesn’t show up, all of it is feeding into how AI describes your brand when someone asks about it.
Given that Facebook generates nearly half of all social comment volume in Respondology’s dataset, the exposure here is proportional. More comments means more signal. More signal means more influence over the narrative that AI systems learn from and repeat.
What lives in your Facebook comments today doesn’t just influence the person reading it tonight. It shapes how your brand gets characterized tomorrow, next month, potentially for years. Unmoderated toxicity doesn’t stay beneath the post. It migrates into the searchable record of who you are, and gets served back to people who never saw the original content at all.
What This Actually Changes
Facebook’s relevance didn’t disappear. The way it creates value shifted, away from reach as the primary metric, toward the quality of the conversation happening around your content.
The brands doing this well in 2026 aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest teams or the largest budgets. They’re the ones who stopped treating comment sections as a byproduct of content and started treating them as infrastructure. They moderate around the clock, because 67% of comments come in outside business hours. They respond to high-intent signals first. They audit what AI says about them quarterly, because they understand their comments are now part of their discovery footprint.
The platform didn’t die. The value just moved somewhere most people forgot to look.
It’s sitting right below the post.
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