Facebook is now at 350 million users worldwide and 100 million in just the US. At this size, demographic data becomes a pretty accurate substitute for data of the population on the whole. The results may still be a little skewed as several categories of people would be under-represented, but the discrepancies are getting smaller, as the results of a study undertaken by Facebook’s Data team seem to indicate. The team went out to determine how Facebook’s user base related to the general Internet population in the US when it comes to the representation of minorities. The study found that, even though there are still differences, the two data sets are becoming a lot more similar.
“[T]he Facebook Data team recently sought to answer the question, “How diverse are the ethnic backgrounds of the people using Facebook?,” the study, published in Facebook blog post, read.
Facebook doesn’t ask for a user’s race or ethnicity when filling out the profile information, so the researchers had to use an alternate, indirect method of determining the users’ ethnic background.
“Comparing people’s surnames on Facebook with data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, we are able to estimate the racial breakdown of Facebook users over the history of the site,” the study explained
The study showed that the percentage of minority users had chang… (read more)