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Pew Research Center

Study: Facebook Users Getting More Privacy Aware

February 25, 2012

Are American Facebook users becoming decidedly unfriendly or are they becoming more privacy aware?

I believe it’s the latter. According to a report released Friday by Pew Internet & American Life Project, an increasing number of American social network users are managing their privacy settings and their online reputations by pruning their profiles.

The study found that:

  • 37% untagged photos, up from 30% in 2009
  • 44% deleted comments, up from 36^ in 2009
  • 63% unfriended someone, up from 56% in 2009

Other interesting findings of the study include:

  • Women are much more likely than men to restrict their profiles; 67% of women set their profiles to “friends only” while 48% of men did the same.
  • Regardless of gender, 58% of social network users say their profile is set to “friends only”, 19% to “friends of friends”, and 20% to “public”.
  • When it comes to managing privacy controls, half of the social networkers found it easy, 48% found it a bit difficult to manage. Only 2% of social media users describe privacy controls as “very difficult to manage”.
  • Young adults were more likely to delete unwanted comments than older people; 52% of users aged 18-29, 40% of those aged 30-40, and 34% of people aged 50-64 said they have deleted comments made on their profile by others.
  • Men are more likely to post something they later regret; 15 percent of male respondents said they posted something regrettable, compared to 8 percent of female respondents.
  • Agewise, it was the younger lot who were more likely to post something regrettable; 15 percent of the respondent aged 18-29 and 5 percent of people over 50 falls under the category.
  • The report found no significant differences in people’s basic privacy controls by age. The younger lots as well as their older counterparts were just as likely to use privacy controls, with figures standing at 62% and 58% respectively.

The study was based on Pew’s phone survey of 2,277 adults conducted in April and May 2011, and data from separate phone survey Pew conducted with teenagers and their parents.

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Study: Facebook Users Get More Than They Give

February 3, 2012

A new study released on Friday shows that the average Facebook users receives more than they give – whether it’s messages, “likes”, tagging, comments, requests, or even “pokes.”

The report from Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, shed light on how people use the site and what they get out of it.

The study was based on a phone survey of 2,255 U.S. adults and that was conducted in October and November 2010.

The survey responses were then matched with server logs of Facebook activity. The findings over a one-month period are as follows:

  • 40% of the participants made a friend request, but 63% received at least one request.
  • The participants pressed the like button next to a friends’ content an average of 14 times, while their content were “liked” an average of 20 times.
  • On average, 9 personal messages were sent, while 12 messages were received.
  • 12% of them tagged a friend in a photo, while 35% were themselves tagged in a photo.

According to survey report, most Facebook users get more than they give because of certain Facebook users, who they term as power users. These power users constitute about 20%-30% of Facebook users, and contributes much more content than the typical user skewing the average. Furthermore, these power users falls under different groups based on their activity dominance like – friending, liking, and photo tagging. Only Five per cent of them turned out to be power users in every activity that Pew logged.

“The more Facebook friends users have, the more they perform every activity that we explored: friending, liking, private messages, commenting, posting, photo tagging, joining groups and poking,” Pew said regarding the survey by its Internet & American Life project.

You can find the full report at here.

Which of these social activities are you more dominant: friending, liking, commenting, tagging, or poking?

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Online News Becoming More Popular Than Newspapers

March 1, 2010

According to a survey by Pew Research Center, online news has become more popular than reading newspapers in the US.

Pew Research Center says that it is the third most popular form of news after local and national TV stations, with around one-third of cell phone owners using their devices to catch up on the latest information.

“News awareness is becoming an anytime, anywhere, any device activity for those who want to stay informed,” it says.

Among the online sources of news, MSNBC (31%), Yahoo(23%), CNN(23%), Google(9%), and AOL (8%) were some of the leading sources for online news gatherers.

According to the survey, an overwhelming majority of Americans, 92 % use multiple resources for news, while 57% goes through two and five websites as part of their news gathering.

On a typical day, 61% of the respondents said they got their news and out of which  78% of them from local news and 71% from national TV networks.

Only 17% said they read news in a national paper.

The survey showed that regular readers of newspapers – either local or national papers – have dropped drastically to 50% in the last 10 years.

Blogs discussing news events were popular among youngster especially those ages 18-24.

Also, with the growing popularity of the internet in the last decade and more recently with the introduction of mobile phone technology, phone users can access to the latest news anytime and anywhere. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, where users shares information and stories have also become a source of online news for many people.

“In this new multi-platform media environment, people’s relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory,” says the survey report.

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