For me, it feels like the majority of visible and active MJ fans online are younger people now. So many are between 14-20 years old. (Twitter, Discord, Tumblr) At the same time, it's mostly younger people that write a full bio into their profiles. Maybe the rest are older people but they just don't bother to put something into their profiles.
I wish more people would come back and start use forums again. They are superior for fandoms. So many fans on other platforms have a burnout because they have to fight against negativity all the time
(Here we fans only have to fight amongst ourselves and our own negativity
)
I agree with your first point, the majority of fans online do seem to skew younger! Perhaps many of the older fans aren't online, or simply don't engage in fan spaces
as much. Different generation and whatnot, plus many older people have a life to tend to so they might have less time for it.
The bit I emphasized, though, is
exactly why I came here! For all the frustration I have with excessive negativity (not just here, but in general - I admittedly don't deal well with it), at the very least I know I won't find any guilters here, for example. Whereas if I were to run, for instance, a fan Twitter, I'd probably have to constantly block guilters and haters because they just love to ruin things for everybody else. In comparison, fandom disagreements just pale and don't seem as relevant. Most of all I want Michael to be positively remembered by the public at large.
I'm no fan of social media in general, it's not just related to Michael Jackson either. Twitter is especially bad, in big part due to the stupid character limit. It's a terrible place, not even just for fans. Forums and fan sites feel a lot safer and I don't understand why people seemed to have abandoned them. Here, we have our own rules that aren't dictated by some direction board of a detached company. We can just ban any vultures and guilters we see, because it's against the rules. As it should be! We can't do that on social media, because we don't own it. Yet it makes up a large part of the modern internet landscape, and I find that very tragic. I truly wish it wasn't like this.