Some Surprising Facts About Facebook And Its Users

The Pew Research Center announced findings from its latest survey of social media users:

• About two-thirds (68%) of adults in the United States use Facebook. That is unchanged from April 2016, but up from 54% in August 2012. Only Youtube gets more adult usage (73%).
• About three-quarters (74%) of adult Facebook users visit the site at least once a day. That's higher than Snapchat (63%) and Instagram (60%).
• Facebook is popular across all demographic groups in the United States: 74% of women use it, as do 62% of men, 81% of persons ages 18 to 29, and 41% of persons ages 65 and older.
• Usage by teenagers has fallen to 51% (at March/April 2018) from 71% during 2014 to 2015. More teens use other social media services: YouTube (85%), Instagram (72%) and Snapchat (69%).
• 43% of adults use Facebook as a news source. That is higher than other social media services: YouTube (21%), Twitter (12%), Instagram (8%), and LinkedIn (6%). More women (61%) use Facebook as a news source than men (39%). More whites (62%) use Facebook as a news source than nonwhites (37%).
• 54% of adult users said they adjusted their privacy settings during the past 12 months. 42% said they have taken a break from checking the platform for several weeks or more. 26% said they have deleted the app from their phone during the past year.

Perhaps, the most troubling finding:

"Many adult Facebook users in the U.S. lack a clear understanding of how the platform’s news feed works, according to the May and June survey. Around half of these users (53%) say they do not understand why certain posts are included in their news feed and others are not, including 20% who say they do not understand this at all."

Facebook users should know that the service does not display in their news feed all posts by their friends and groups. Facebook's proprietary algorithm -- called its "secret sauce" by some -- displays items it thinks users will engage with = click the "Like" or other emotion buttons. This makes Facebook a terrible news source, since it doesn't display all news -- only the news you (probably already) agree with.

That's like living life in an online bubble. Sadly, there is more.

If you haven't watched it, PBS has broadcast a two-part documentary titled, "The Facebook Dilemma" (see trailer below), which arguable could have been titled, "the dark side of sharing." The Frontline documentary rightly discusses Facebook's approaches to news, privacy, its focus upon growth via advertising revenues, how various groups have used the service as a weapon, and Facebook's extensive data collection about everyone.

Yes, everyone. Obviously, Facebook collects data about its users. The service also collects data about nonusers in what the industry calls "shadow profiles." CNet explained that during an April:

"... hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the Facebook CEO confirmed the company collects information on nonusers. "In general, we collect data of people who have not signed up for Facebook for security purposes," he said... That data comes from a range of sources, said Nate Cardozo, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. That includes brokers who sell customer information that you gave to other businesses, as well as web browsing data sent to Facebook when you "like" content or make a purchase on a page outside of the social network. It also includes data about you pulled from other Facebook users' contacts lists, no matter how tenuous your connection to them might be. "Those are the [data sources] we're aware of," Cardozo said."

So, there might be more data sources besides the ones we know about. Facebook isn't saying. So much for greater transparency and control claims by Mr. Zuckerberg. Moreover, data breaches highlight the problems with the service's massive data collection and storage:

"The fact that Facebook has [shadow profiles] data isn't new. In 2013, the social network revealed that user data had been exposed by a bug in its system. In the process, it said it had amassed contact information from users and matched it against existing user profiles on the social network. That explained how the leaked data included information users hadn't directly handed over to Facebook. For example, if you gave the social network access to the contacts in your phone, it could have taken your mom's second email address and added it to the information your mom already gave to Facebook herself..."

So, Facebook probably launched shadow profiles when it introduced its mobile app. That means, if you uploaded the address book in your phone to Facebook, then you helped the service collect information about nonusers, too. This means Facebook acts more like a massive advertising network than simply a social media service.

How has Facebook been able to collect massive amounts of data about both users and nonusers? According to the Frontline documentary, we consumers have lax privacy laws in the United States to thank for this massive surveillance advertising mechanism. What do you think?