How Diverse is Facebook?
Here's a fascinating analysis of ethnic diversity and patterns of participation by different ethnic groups on U.S. Facebook, with lots of charts, breakdowns, and thoughtful accounts of methodology, brought to us by the "Facebook team"
"How Diverse is Facebook?" http://tiny.cc/6jlxO
Here's a sample from the conclusion of this exhaustive report:
To look at the diversity of non-White users, the example shown at the top of this post shows our model prediction as a fraction of the Facebook population as well as the percent of the overall U.S. Internet population for each ethnicity. Here the solid lines show the Facebook percentage while the dashed lines show the U.S. population (in this case, we have chosen the U.S. population at the end of the time period). Because White users are a large majority, we have left them out of this plot.
Another approach to visualizing this data is to look at the relative saturation of each race. This is the fraction of users on Facebook compared to the fraction we would expect from the U.S. Internet population at that time. For instance, if Facebook had 100M users, and Asian Americans made up 4.4% of the U.S. Internet population, we would expect to find 4.4M Asian users on Facebook. If instead we observe 5M then the relative saturation would be roughly 114%.
The plot above shows Facebook saturation by ethnic and racial groups. Since 2005, Asian/Pacific Islanders have been much more likely to be on Facebook than Whites, and that has remained so. While Hispanics were once 40 percent as likely as Whites to be on the site, this number has been steadily climbing since early 2007 and currently is at 80 percent. This graph also shows that Black users are now about as likely to be on the site as White users.
- Cathy Davidson's blog
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mixed ethnicity?
If I read Fb's methodology correctly, they used last names as an indicator of race. They admitted they'd be wrong many times, but overall, they could predict accurately *enough* one's race. As a black American whose family names are English or Irish and often not replicated in the US (no Smiths, Jones', Jacksons or Washingtons) I find it problematic. I didn't see exactly, how they accounted for Other mixes, such as Black/Asian, Hispanic/Asian, White/Black, etc. If someone if half Korean and half white American, but that Korean name come from the mother and the American name was Smyth, it seems they'd be skewed wrongly, as white. While I think this is a great study to undertake, it also seems that Fb veers too closely to assumptions about who "should" be what when doing the survey and doesn't take enough into account those of us who are mixed or those of us whose names are not "typical" enough to warrant being easily sorted.
Categories
You're exactly right, Kim. The categories are so mutually exclusive that they blur some really interesting other information. It's a single-factor focus. Troubling and error-prone, and yet a start too. Pres Obama is, what, African American by this logic? His half sister is Asian American? Obama? Sotero? It's all in a name. Not.
Ignoring History
Something that we run into quite frequently in the South are African Americans who have the same family names as white people. This often stems from the days of slavery, when slaves were given the names of their owners. FB seems to have ignored history as well as the realities of modern times.
ignoring history
@NancyKimberly - You're 100% right. Although Fb has made a start, Fb is supposed to be ahead of the game as a web-based enterprise. It seems like a reporter asked them what their demos were and they had no idea, so they asked someone to come up with an algorithm before they left on Christmas break. Of course, I could be really sensitive, as I'm always skewed as white in these kinds of things. ^-^ I wonder if in light of user criticism, they'll adapt their research methods?