There are now three times as many pensioners using Facebook in Ireland as teenagers, figures from the social network indicate.

While 220,000 people over 65 now use Facebook, only 86,000 teens are on the platform.

It suggests that the world’s biggest social platform is being shunned by those under 20, with many regarding it as a place for their parents and grandparents to share badly taken photos and misinformation.

The figures come from Facebook’s advertising platform, measured and analysed by Cork-based Mulley Communications.

A spokesperson for Facebook said that the numbers may not reflect exact user figures as they are designed to highlight “potential reach” rather than recorded usage.

However, the figures also suggest that while kids have little interest in using Facebook, they still flock to the social giant’s subsidiary, Instagram, in large numbers.

According to the company’s ad guidance figures, 200,000 teenagers are signed up on the photo-sharing platform. Older people, by contrast, do not use Instagram as much, with just 55,000 over-65s on the platform.

“While Facebook’s main social network is slowing, Instagram is making up for any lost users,” said Damien Mulley, founder of Mulley Communications. “The statistics show that Facebook's overall company reach in Ireland across their social apps is reaching an even greater number of people than before.”

In total, the ad figures suggest that Facebook has 2.7m Irish users while Instagram has 2.1m subscribers here. The tech giant’s messaging platform, Whatsapp, is even more dominant with three out of four Irish people signed up, according to separate survey data from Ipsos MRBI.

Instagram’s ‘Stories’ feature is accessed by 1.7m Irish people, while its TikTok-copycat feature ‘Reels’ is now used by 540,000 people.

“While many of us knocked Instagram copying Snapchat and now TikTok, both of these new products attached to the existing Instagram app have worked and have earned the Facebook parent company even more revenue,” said Mr Mulley.