Facebook’s Future Is Private Groups, for Better and Worse

A few months ago, Julie Tu was losing interest in Facebook. She’d deleted the app from her phone and only occasionally visited the website. Like many of her peers, the 25-year-old painter and photographer in Longmont, Colo., spent most of her social media time on Instagram. Then she heard about a Facebook group called Subtle Asian Traits, which in a matter of months had drawn more than a million people of Asian descent to post memes poking lighthearted fun at their shared cultural heritage. Tu quickly became obsessed, and Facebook suggested she join other meme groups with names such as Subtle Asian Creativity and Subtle Asian Mental Health Support Group. “Now I’m on it for hours at a time,” she says.

Fast-growing meme and community groups have been a bright spot for Facebook Inc. over the past several months amid a series of privacy scandals and the company’s own projections that people are spending less time on its namesake site. Subtle Asian Traits, while exceptionally popular, has origins typical of the genre: A group of Asian-Australian high school students, mostly first-generation immigrants, started it to distract themselves from exams. Screenshots of text exchanges with strict parents, photos of favorite childhood foods, and images that illustrate the difficulty of learning an Asian language usually attract thousands of likes and comments. “We’ve grown up in this environment where we’re the minority, and we don’t really have a community,” says group co-creator Anny Xie. “In this group, with a million other Asians, you’re all having the same experience as a community.”