While Facebook is under fire for disclosing more data about its users to the public, Facebook is also touting that data about its users shows that they are increasingly diverse, with a racial and ethnic breakdown that nearly mirrors the overall diversity of the U.S. population, according to a blog entry posted on the social networking site on Wednesday.
While Facebook users in the U.S. were primarily white and Asian in the beginning of 2006, blacks and Latinos are increasingly joining the site, and now comprise 11% and 9% of Facebook users, respectively. And 6% of U.S. Facebook users are Asians, down from about 8% four years ago.
Facebook data team researchers Lars Backstrom, Jonathan Chang, Cameron Marlow and Itamar Rosenn wrote that they were interested in finding out more about the composition of race and ethnicity among Facebook users. So they compared Facebook users’ surnames with data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Genealogy Project, which measured the frequency of the most popular 150,000 surnames in the United States along with the race and ethnicity associated with the person who had each one.
“This data set allows us to predict what a person’s race is based solely on his or her surname,” the blog post said. “While these predictions will be often be wrong, in aggregate they will be correct….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 researchers found that, in looking at the frequency of the last names of some 100 million Facebook users in the U.S. and comparing them with U.S. census data (with some statistical adjustments thrown in for more accuracy) from January 2006 through January of 2009, the percentage of ethnic minorities began to approach the same breakdown of the overall population of Internet users during that same time period.
For example, blacks comprised about 7% of Facebook users in early 2006, as compared with about 9.5% of Internet users overall. But by January of 2009, they made up 11% of Facebook users as well as 11% of Internet users overall. Hispanics made up about 3.5% of Facebook users in January of 2006 and about 4.5% of Internet users, but they comprised 6% of Facebook users and 4% of Internet users by January of 2009. READ FULL STORY
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