maybe i sound like i'm wearing a tin hat but i don't totally trust their active user numbers or believe that facebook is growing active users in the US

it is not their numbers :)

i have a facebook acct from years ago to run ads and accidentally clicked a fb link once last year?

you won't count

in my experience it's good to poke at numbers that don't match your intuition. that's how you get to reality.

except what you are doing is not looking at numbers but drawing from either your personal experiences or "oh, I've heard no one is on facebook these days"

always follow the money - investors would RUN FOR THE HILLS if Facebook was what you are thinking Facebook is. maybe this will be different in 10+ years when boomers die off and GenZ, GenA are in their "prime" but at this point Facebook is the ruler of social media