Facebook Ain’t Cool With The Kids No More.

That’s the headline on a post at CrunchGear this morning, claiming that “social networks simply aren’t cool anymore among the 15-to-24-year-old crowd.” That post was based on an article in this morning’s Guardian, a British newspaper, titled “It’s SO Over: Cool Cyberkids Abandon Social Networking Sites.”

So is it true? Are young people abandoning social networking sites in droves? Have the youth of today written off Facebook as uncool?

Well, no.

The CrunchGear and Guardian pieces were both based on a report from the UK media regulatory agency Ofcom. Specifically, they were based on a single piece of survey data from page 289 of that report.

According to Ofcom, social networking use by British youth aged 15 to 24 held steady at 50% from the third quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2009, after dropping from a high of 55% in the first quarter of 2008.

That’s it. That’s the whole story. A five point drop in social networking use a year ago among British youth.

Note that there’s nothing here about which young people are dropping out of social networking, or why, or how sure the pollsters are that they actually are. Nothing about the poll’s margin of error, which I wasn’t able to find in the report. And nothing, of course, about “coolness.”

And here’s one other thing. The Guardian article says “part of the reason” that “the kids don’t like social networking anymore … appears” to be “that older users do.” The US trade magazine Billboard dropped the hedge, saying that “adults’ love of social networking sites is driving away teens.” But there’s nothing — literally nothing — in the original report to suggest this. The report said social networking use in Britain dropped a little among 15-to-24s, and that went up a little among older people, but that’s it. There’s no support in the data for any sort of cause-and-effect relationship.

Next up: Mashable’s post on “Why Teens Don’t Tweet.”