A facebook that looks like America

January 3, 2010 3:08 PM

How diverse is Facebook? Facebook data scientists Lars Backstrom, Jonathan Chang, Cameron Marlow and Itamar Rosenn use data about racial distribution of common surnames to estimate that Facebook is slightly less Hispanic, about as black, and substantially more Asian than U.S. internet users overall. Statblogger Andrew Gelman weighs in, as does danah boyd, who also includes a link to her new paper, "White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook."
posted by escabeche (34 comments total)

This has been done to death on the blue and is pretty thin in terms of methodology.
posted by jock@law at 3:14 PM on January 3, 2010

pretty much a double
posted by pyramid termite at 3:19 PM on January 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

Previously.
posted by rtha at 3:19 PM on January 3, 2010

jinx
posted by rtha at 3:19 PM on January 3, 2010

Wow, so dAnAh B_oY^_d was wrong? Shocking.

Just because Facebook has become broadly adopted does not mean that what everyone experiences on Facebook is the same.

WOW REALLY?

I also like how she refers to her work as being "In the field" like she's some kind of hard core anthropologist riding a decked out science jeep through the African Savannah or something.
posted by delmoi at 3:20 PM on January 3, 2010 [7 favorites]

It's not a double because this is mostly about new data that completely disproves DANAH BOYD's hypothesis.
posted by delmoi at 3:21 PM on January 3, 2010 [3 favorites]

it's all people with children!
posted by fuq at 3:22 PM on January 3, 2010

Oops -- the main link and the study described there by the Facebook team are new, but danah boyd's work has indeed been discussed here before: looks like the previous post covered a lecture she gave on the paper which is now available, and which I linked to. I guess we can either just talk about the new part and forget I mentioned boyd, or junk the whole post if it seems destined to do nothing but rehash what people said in the boyd thread.
posted by escabeche at 3:24 PM on January 3, 2010

One potential source of error in this estimate comes from our assumption that users are selected at random from the U.S. population. What if Facebook is primarily White? Wouldn't a majority of the Smiths be White then, breaking our assumption? In order to address this, we refine our estimates using a statistical technique known as mixture-modeling. We imagine that people come from a population with unknown racial/ethnic proportions. Individuals then get assigned names based on their race/ethnicity. Under this assumption, determining the ethnic makeup of Facebook becomes a problem of back-solving each individual's ethnicity using only their revealed name.

This seems incredibly handwavey, and the linked Wikipedia article on mixture modeling is wholly impenetrable to me. Can anyone who understands it weigh in on whether it's a sane use of this technique?
posted by enn at 3:34 PM on January 3, 2010

I think a good analogy can be drawn here between danah's initial claims regarding facebook v. myspace and items like cell phones v. pagers. A claim could have been made in about 1992 that cell phones were being taken up by professionals such as doctors and lawyers while they began to eschew pagers, leaving pagers to, ahem, "subaltern" professionals like drug dealers and other people without a reliable landline, fixed address, or an office. And sure, this might have made sense in 1992, but by 2000 or so, cell phones were the universal norm and their ownership became much less of a class marker because of their ubiquity. And, yes, one could claim that the ubiquity of cell phones "does not mean that experiences on [cell phones] is the same," but that the distinction that was interesting in a technological moment back in the early 90s with respect to the sort of people who migrated to cell phones and the sort of people who stayed with pagers is no longer a relevant one.
posted by deanc at 3:55 PM on January 3, 2010

How does it compare to college students overall, which really is the demographic here.
posted by DU at 4:04 PM on January 3, 2010

This is the Cameron Marlow who made Blogdex and has a Ph.D from MIT. I'm not sure, but I suspect his research methodology is within reason.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 4:07 PM on January 3, 2010

"White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook."

Compelling Use of the Question Mark? How Colons Became So 2004 in Academic Paper Titles
posted by nosila at 4:11 PM on January 3, 2010 [17 favorites]

It's Danah Boyd.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:18 PM on January 3, 2010

Another thread about name capitalization!
posted by absalom at 4:19 PM on January 3, 2010

Friendster FTW.
posted by The Deej at 4:24 PM on January 3, 2010

Wait, so they assumed people's races based on their names? What race do they assume "Merchgirl" to be?
posted by divabat at 4:28 PM on January 3, 2010

This again?
posted by Edgewise at 4:41 PM on January 3, 2010 [2 favorites]

Why does any of this matter, considering that every one of any race who has computer access is free to start an account???? My own friend list is quite multicultural, thankyouverrymuch.
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 4:55 PM on January 3, 2010

Why does any of this matter

It doesn't (unless you make your living writing and/or talking about it).
posted by MikeMc at 5:00 PM on January 3, 2010

My own friend list is quite multicultural, thankyouverrymuch.

Some of her best Facebook friends are black.
posted by grouse at 5:01 PM on January 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

This again?

You mean another thread where people bypass the content of the links in question in order to gripe about how Ms. boyd prefers to have her name written?

Yeah, it does look that way.
posted by wreckingball at 5:08 PM on January 3, 2010

she's some kind of hard core anthropologist riding a decked out science jeep through the African Savannah or something.

She was browsing in Safari.
posted by kid ichorous at 5:09 PM on January 3, 2010 [10 favorites]

how Ms. boyd prefers to have her name written

That's ms. boyd, you insensitive clod.
posted by cillit bang at 5:24 PM on January 3, 2010

My own friend list is quite multicultural, thankyouverrymuch.

Some of her best Facebook friends are black.
posted by grouse 36 minutes ago [+]

What are my Hispanic friends, chopped liver?
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 5:41 PM on January 3, 2010

Is this something I'd have to have a Facebook to care about?
posted by asockpuppet at 5:44 PM on January 3, 2010

In other news, if you don't like the weatherinternet, wait half an hour.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:49 PM on January 3, 2010

Metafilter doesn't seem to like social scientists, at whom they fling alot of monkey-poo.

Andrew Gelman seems to think this is important:

And then there's lots more you can do, once you have these numbers; for example, you can estimate how often people in different groups (categorized by age, sex, ethnicity, etc.) log into Facebook, how many Facebook friends they have, and so forth. You can get all sorts of details, far beyond anything my collaborators and I have learned about social connections.

and his (linked) How Many People Do You Know in Prison?: Using Overdispersion in Count Data to Estimate Social Structure in Networks is a good example work in this area. I think danah does have a point about different uses of social media but she's not articulating it very well:

But I would argue that what people experience with this tool - and with the other social media assets they use - looks very different based on their experience.

And yes, "fieldwork" may sound pretentious because she's not a natural scientist, but that's what it is when a social scientist interviews people and collects data. She's certainly right that different age groups have different usage/experience patterns. So what conclusions can we draw? FB became universal in 2009 and normalized its minority distribution curves, which had been (still is) over-represented by Asians and under-represented by Blacks and Hispanics. It would useful to see similar work on the Myspace population for comparison. Quantcast's MySpace profile (A-A=24%) doesn't seem to agree with Social Networking Site Demographics (A-A=11%).
posted by psyche7 at 5:50 PM on January 3, 2010

Some of her best Facebook friends are black.

Actually, I'm more of a Greek God bronze.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:11 PM on January 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

Why does any of this matter, considering that every one of any race who has computer access is free to start an account????

This is something you would have had to read the links to understand.

To summarize, the boyd paper said that there are class and race divisions in web site use amongst teens and other age/social groups, that mirror similar divisions in their real life environments. It reported that exclusion along racial and social lines that occurs in schools also occurs online, and that Caucasians in particular may avoid the social stigma of associating publicly on websites with people of different races and classes. The problem, boyd argued, was that doing so reinforces acceptance of classism and racism.

The latest study would seem to disprove boyd's findings about the way members of different races use and are attracted to social networking sites. However, it does not necessarily entirely disprove her hypothesis about "white flight" and internet social circles and exclusion within groups.

My own friend list is quite multicultural, thankyouverrymuch.

The point is a bit more complicated than that.
posted by zarq at 6:44 PM on January 3, 2010

My Facebook friends are 6% Feline, 4% Supernatural deity, 2% Canine, and 2% Dinosaur, and half of them have a yearly salary that is ten times the national average. I hope all of that data was taken seriously by researchers.

Seriously, about half the people I know have sock-puppet accounts on Facebook that look, at first glance, like actual people. People make these accounts to browse anonymously, keep stalkers at bay, have jokey conversations online, explore certain Facebook communities that they wouldn't want their account linked with, or for Facebook apps. Aside from fake accounts, how many people accurately report? And what can guess about them based on their friends after they blindly add 200 people to build their mafia?

Using a shaky method to estimate race, education, or socioeconomic pigeonhole from already shaky self-report data sounds like a really silly thing to talk about seriously or publish. Although, I would be interested in reading a report of cultural and socioeconomic diversity within Mafia Wars and Texas Hold 'em bots.
posted by Avelwood at 6:50 PM on January 3, 2010

To summarize, the boyd paper said that there are class and race divisions in web site use amongst teens and other age/social groups, that mirror similar divisions in their real life environments. It reported that exclusion along racial and social lines that occurs in schools also occurs online

Groundbreaking work indeed. Who would have guessed that people would associate themselves with the same type of people both online and IRL? I'm dying to see the results of the five year study on the racial/ethnic breakdown of BFFs.
posted by MikeMc at 6:53 PM on January 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

I was always under the impression that people fled from Myspace because half the members were spambots hawking porn.
posted by drezdn at 7:20 PM on January 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

i'm assuming they have only looked at US based regional networks on Facebook? And taken into consideration that today's FB lets you change regional networks every so often ?

Facebook usage stats July 2009
posted by infini at 7:25 PM on January 3, 2010