Facebook has faced numerous issues in the past few years that have resulted in a few accounts and pages being shut down in USA and abroad on the social media website.
In addition to privacy concerns, a number of revelations ranging from fake news to how the social networking giant offered racial targeting to its advertisers have been few of the factors why people are giving up on Facebook.
A survey conducted by Pew Research Center in May-June, 2018, confirms the growing mistrust between Facebook and its users.
42% of users have taken a break from the website in the past 12 months, 54%Â have adjusted their privacy settings and 26%Â have deleted the Facebook app from their devices.
Following the recent removal of accounts and pages, Facebook faced a lot of heat from the conservatives, who were mainly affected by the bans.
Trend shows younger users are more cautious
While only 26% of the total Facebook users who responded to the survey deleted the app, demographics show a different twist.
Over 44% users between the ages of 18 to 29, deleted the Facebook app from their phones.
The trend isn’t limited to deleting the app, but even those who stayed show a similar trend when it comes to adjusting privacy settings on Facebook.
While 64% of young users changed their privacy settings on the social network, only about 33% of users who are 65 years old or more have done this. Though this can be owed to the fact that younger users are more in number than the elder users on the platform.
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After the California-based social media mogul was hit by criticism over collecting data of their users from third-parties, they updated the privacy settings, making it easier for users to download their data that has been collected on the website.
Since then, about 9% of users have downloaded the personal data being collected by Facebook. Out of these people, 47% of people deleted the Facebook app.
Users don’t understand the Facebook news feed
According to another finding of the Pew Research Center, “Facebook users ages 18 and older lack a clear understanding of how the site’s news feed operates, feel ordinary users have little control over what appears there and have not actively tried to influence the content the feed delivers to them.”
28% of the Facebook users believe that they’ve no control over what appears on their news feed while 57% believe that they have a little control.
The trend seems to have reversed here as 43% of elders above the age of 65 think that they’ve no control over their newsfeed while 46% think that they have little control.
63% of the total users haven’t even tried to influence what appears in their news feed. Younger users in the age group of 18-29 are the largest demographic at 48% who have tried to manipulate their Facebook news feed.
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