Nearly half of millennials have deleted Facebook app, study shows
Nearly half of millennials have deleted Facebook app,
study shows
By Andy Meek, BGR September 5, 2018 | 8:01pm | Updated
On a day when its chief operating officer was on Capitol
Hill this morning getting a grilling from DC lawmakers, Facebook is also the
focus of a newly released Pew Research Center study that’s chock-a-block with
negative trends for the beleaguered social giant.
Among the more attention-grabbing findings: More than one
in four people have deleted the Facebook app from their phones, a figure that
gets a lot higher when you focus just on 18 to 29-year-olds (44 percent of whom
say they’ve done so). All told, 74 percent of Facebook users, according to the
Pew data, say they’ve taken one of the following actions in the past year.
They’ve either:
·
adjusted their privacy settings
·
taken a break from Facebook for at least a few
weeks
·
or deleted it from their phone altogether
Pew gathered these findings by surveying a group of US
adults between May 29 and June 11, so definitely with plenty of time for them
to have formed opinions and changed their behaviors in light of the Cambridge
Analytica scandal.
“It’s certainly been a year of scandals for the social
media behemoth,” reports TechCrunch about today’s survey findings, “which
started 2018 already on the back foot already in the wake of Kremlin-backed
election interference revelations — and with Mark Zuckerberg saying his annual
personal mission for the new year would be the embarrassingly unfun challenge
of ‘fixing Facebook.’
“Since then things have only got worse, with a major
global scandal kicking off in March after fresh revelations about the Cambridge
Analytica data misuse sandal snowballed and went on to drag all sorts of other
data malfeasance skeletons out of Facebook’s closet.”
While there’s a bit of divergence in the Pew data between
older and younger Facebook users, with the latter especially showing a
particular ease with breaking away from the platform, it’s worth noting that
the data isn’t showing much of a difference depending on if the user is a
Democrat or Republican.
The Pew researchers found that Republicans, more so than
Democrats, think the platform tends to censor political speech. One the
arguments that also got wrapped up in Wednesday’s hearings that featured
representatives of Facebook and Twitter — and even controversial broadcast
firebrand and conspiracy-peddler Alex Jones, right there in the front row at
the Senate hearing.
Still, according to Pew: “Despite these concerns, the
poll found that nearly identical shares of Democrats and Republicans (including
political independents who lean toward either party) use Facebook. Republicans
are no more likely than Democrats to have taken a break from Facebook or
deleted the app from their phone in the past year.”
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