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In front of Facebook Sheryl Sandberg, COO, testified before the Congress later today, where she will be interviewed alongside Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, while US lawmakers are wondering how to regulate social media platforms (even though Larry Pew Research Center has published new research suggesting that Americans have become more cautious and critical in their use of Facebook over the past year.
This is certainly a year of scandals for the social media giant, which has already begun in 2018 already after the revelations of electoral interference supported by the Kremlin – and with Mark Zuckerberg. affirming that his annual personal mission for the new year would be the embarrassing challenge of "repairing Facebook".
Since then, things have only got worse, with a big global scandal that erupted in March after new revelations about the Cambridge Analytica. The misuse of data has snowballed and has resulted in all sorts of other skeletal data crimes in Facebook's closet.
"Lock the platform" is the new "closing of the stable door after the departure of the horse".
All this led Zuckerberg to be perched on a booster cushion in the Senate and Congress, where he was criticized by US lawmakers for dodging their questions. (European legislators have criticized him for avoiding their questions too.)
So, if US Facebook users change the way they use the platform as a result of this scandal, it's not surprising (or only if you believe the lie that Zuckerberg has been defending for years).
Pew sees a change in the US user relationship with the service, noting that many users have adjusted the privacy settings (52%); took a Facebook break of at least a few weeks (42%); while about a quarter (26%) said they removed the Facebook application from their cell phone.
In total, nearly three-quarters (74%) of Facebook users reported taking at least one of these three actions in the past year.
More worrisome for Facebook, he found differences in users' reaction based on their age – the youngest users (18 to 29) being by far the most likely to remove the Facebook app during past year.
So, private life lived and hit the young people then – no, uh, dead.
Similarly, Pew found that older users are far less likely to say that they have adjusted their privacy settings on Facebook in the last 12 months: only one-third of users aged 65 and over more answered 64% of younger users.
He also found that only about one in ten Facebook users (9%) had uploaded their personal data on Facebook – a possibility to which Zuckerberg's testimony to US lawmakers was giving additional publicity.
Despite the fact that this group represents a relatively small share of Facebook's population, Pew considers them to be "very privacy conscious" – saying that about half (47%) of users have downloaded their personal data on Facebook have removed the application from their mobile phone, while 79% have chosen to adjust their privacy settings.
Ergo it looks like awareness of data risks strengthens pro-privacy behavior among users. Who thought about it ?!
Pew's study was conducted between May 29 and June 11, 2018 – so much after the Cambridge Analytica scandal snowballed into a major public relations crisis for Facebook – the research firm that polled more than 4,500 people.
Another Pew study, also done at the same time and published today, suggests that many US users do not understand how Facebook's news feed works.
The survey found that "significant shares" of Facebook users aged 18 and older do not have a clear understanding of how the site's news feed works; feel that they have little control over what appears there; and have not actively tried to influence the content that the feed provides them.
When asked if they understood why some articles, but not others, were included in their news feed, about half of US adults using Facebook (53%) say they do not understand – a fifth (20%) is fine.
Older users are more likely to say that they do not understand how the news feed works: only 38% of Facebook users aged 50 and over say they understand why some posts are included, as opposed to 59 % of users aged 18 to 18 years old. 29.
While Facebook offers tools to let users control what they see in the feed, for example by prioritizing people or hiding messages, Pew finds that only 14% of Facebook users think ordinary users control the content. it shows up there – and twice that share (28%) said they had no control.
The oldest Facebook users feel in particular that they have few agencies in this regard: 37% of Facebook users aged 50 and over think that users have no control over their News feed, about double the users aged 18 to 49 found.
The existence of user controls on the Facebook platform was a factor that Zuckerberg repeatedly postponed in his testimony to lawmakers earlier this year, claiming for example that Facebook users have a "check" complete "on how their platform offers them.
Regardless of the truth about the content of this statement, many Facebook users clearly feel they have little control over what they are exposed to – which undermines the company's claims (ie how their own data are used, or what other data the service exposes them).
The lack of transparency around algorithm-controlled content platforms is likely to be a key theme in the questioning of social media executives by the Senate Selective Intelligence Committee later today. (More to know how to watch the hearings here.)
We contacted Facebook to comment on Pew's research.
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