It’s not just an attractive advertising demographic that Facebook is losing as teens take their mercurial attention elsewhere in a sullen search of what’s cool. Facebook sans the cool kids may well be taking a substantial knock to the accuracy of its data, too.

A study of Facebook use among 16-to-18-year-olds in eight EU countries recently concluded that Facebook is “dead and buried” to teens, who have migrated to rival platforms like Instagram (itself owned by Facebook, of course), Snapchat and Twitter. Who is on Facebook? Parents.

Case in point: my 70-year-old mother is on Facebook (how she came to sign up is a telling tale in itself*). On her Facebook profile she deliberately has only a handful of friends — being as she’s not accustomed to the concept of sharing digital information with large groups of people. So instead of the hundreds of ‘friends’ younger Facebook users (used to) typically…