Race and Social Network Sites: Putting Facebook’s Data in Context
by Guest Contributor danah boyd, originally published at apophenia
A few weeks ago, Facebook’s data team released a set of data addressing a simple but complex question: How Diverse is Facebook? Given my own work over the last two years concerning the intersection of race/ethnicity/class and social network sites, I feel the need to respond. And, with pleasure, I’m going to respond by sharing a draft of a new paper.
But first, I want to begin by thanking the Facebook data team for actually making this data available for public dialogue. Far too few companies are willing to share their internal analyses, especially about topics that make people uncomfortable. I was disappointed that so many academics immediately began critiquing Facebook rather than appreciating the glimpse that we get into the data they get to see. So thank you Facebook data team!
There are many different ways to collect quantitative data involving categories like race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, etc. None of them are perfect. Even asking people to self-identify can be fraught, especially when someone is asked to place themselves into a box. Ask a self-identified queer boi to identity into the binaries of “female/male” and “gay/straight” and you’ll see nothing short of explosive anger. Race certainly isn’t any prettier, let alone ethnicity or class. The salience of these qualities also depends on what we’re trying to measure, what we’re trying to say. For example, if we’re talking about people who experience being targets of racism, should we concern ourselves more with self-identification or external labeling? At the coarsest level, we often assume race to boil down to skin color, meaning that we have to take into account how people read race, how they experience race, how they identify with race. We must always remember that race is a social construct and one’s experiences of race are shaped by how one perceives themselves in relation to others and how others perceive them. And the very notion of race differs across the globe.
Of course, this is bloody messy. And ethnicity and class are even harder to locate because self-identification isn’t always the best measure. Heck, while Americans have learned to self-identify with race (thanks to countless forms), we aren’t typically asked to self-identify with ethnicity or class. So these are pretty murky territories. As a result, scholars and demographers and marketers and many others have different ways of trying to measure these categories. None are perfect. We can debate endlessly about which is better but, personally, I think that does the conversation a disservice.
In trying to measure race (and, partially, ethnicity) of its users without having self-identification, Facebook decided to use a statistical technique known as mixture-modeling to make a best guess as to the racial makeup of its user base. They go to great lengths explaining what they did, but it is this graph that we should be attentive to:
This graph highlights that those American users most likely to be white were overrepresented on Facebook until last year while those most likely to be Asian have been overrepresented as far back as they are measuring. Yet, the two lines that should pique our interest are the blue and red lines, highlighting that those most likely to be black and Hispanic have been underrepresented until very recently. In other words, 2009 is the year in which Facebook went “mainstream” among all measured racial/ethnic groups in the U.S.
Folks keep asking me if this surprises me. It does not. This very much matches what I’m seeing in the field. (It also confirms what I was seeing in 2006-2007.) But it also doesn’t tell the whole story. Numbers never do. MySpace has definitely declined among young users in the U.S., especially in the last 12 months, but race – and ethnicity and socio-economic status – still inflect people’s experiences with these technologies. Just because Facebook has become broadly adopted does not mean that what everyone experiences on Facebook is the same. I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to see Facebook data that broke down app usage by demographic data (age, location, gender, and their measure of race). Given what I’m seeing in the field, I’d expect you’d see variation. I’d also expect to see variation in terms of how the service is accessed – via mobile, web, 3rd party APIs, etc. As young people tour me through their Facebook experience, I’m regularly reminded that different groups have wholly different experiences with the same service. As Facebook has become a platform, it is no longer reasonable to simply think about access. There’s also a different issue at play… perception. People perceive certain practices to be universal because “everyone they know” is doing it that way. One of the hardest parts of my job is to explain to people that what they are seeing, what they are experiencing, is not the same as what others are. Even if they’re using the same tools.
When the “digital divide” conversations started up, folks boiled down the discussion to being one of access. If only everyone had access, everything would be hunky dory. We’re closer to universal access today than ever before, but access is not bringing us the magical utopian panacea that we all dreamed of. Henry Jenkins has rightly pointed out that we see the emergence of a “participation gap” in that people’s participation is of different quantity and quality depending on many other factors. Social media takes all of this to a new level. It’s not just a question of what you get to experience with your access, but what you get to experience with your friend group with access. In other words, if you’re friends with 24/7 always-on geeks, what you’re experiencing with social media is very different than if you’re experiencing social media in a community where your friends all spend 12+ hours a day doing a form of labor that doesn’t allow access to internet technologies. Facebook’s data provides a glimpse into how Facebook access has become mainstream. It is the modern day portal. 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.
Many folks think that I care about access. Don’t get me wrong – access is important. But I’m much more concerned about how racist and classist attitudes are shaping digital media, how technology reinforces inequality, and how our habit of assuming that everyone uses social media just like we do reinforces social divisions that we prefer to ignore. This issue became apparent to me when doing fieldwork because of the language that young people were using to differentiate MySpace and Facebook. Adoption differences alone were never the whole story. Ever since I released my controversial blog essay 2.5 years ago, I have been working to write up my data and analysis in a meaningful way. Doing so has not been easy. I’ve been very uncomfortable handling my own data, trying to treat it in a manner that is respectful of the teens that I interviewed and the dynamics that I witnessed. Thankfully, Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White gave me the space to work out these issues. The fruit of my labor will be published in an upcoming Routledge anthology edited by them called Digital Race Anthology. With their permission, I am sharing with you a working draft of the article that I have struggled to produce:
In this article, I explore the themes I’ve been discussing for years but focus specifically on the language that young people used to differentiate MySpace and Facebook and how that language can be understood through the historical dynamics of segregation in the U.S. My decision to use the “white flight” frame is meant to be provocative, to encourage the reader to think about the rhetoric that we’re currently using and its parallels to earlier times. For example, how we employ “safety” as a way of marking turf and segmenting populations.
Given the conversations prompted by Facebook’s data, I felt the need to share this work-in-progress. Please feel free to comment or share your thoughts in whatever format makes sense to you.
(Image Credit: captain simon’s mandolin’s photostream on Flickr)
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Kat wrote:
The default avatar of facebook is a White male. You cannot change it. That says it all.
What I think was one of many factors for the underrepresentation of Blacks and Hispanics (and potentially one of many factors for the overrepresentation of Asian Americans) is the fact that facebook started out at Harvard, went on to other Ivy League schools, then to other elite universities in the US and Europe, then to more “mainstream” universities, then to huge companies and employers (McKinsey, banks etc) and only THEN did it open up to everyone. I would suggest that the underrepresentation of Blacks and Hispanics of these places was mirrored in facebook.
Posted 19 Jan 2010 at 10:16 am ¶
dersk wrote:
Hmm. It seems to me that their methodology might create a self-fulfulling prophecy. They analyze based on last names, and use US Census information to apply the probability that a given last name applies to a given race (e.g., the last name “Williams” might be 70-20 white-black, to oversimplify).
So, it seems to me their assumption presupposes that the ethnic makeup of Facebook users exactly matches the ethnic makeup of the US population (well, to be really pedantic, the ethnic makeup of people who reply to the census). And that’s exactly what they were trying to test, right?
@Kat: I think identifying this image:
http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/pics/d_silhouette.gif
as a white person is a little bit of a stretch. I don’t know too many people with a sideways-TinTin do, but to me that’s just someone with straight hair and one heck of a cowlick.
Posted 19 Jan 2010 at 10:31 am ¶
dersk wrote:
Duh. I feel like a mid-80s Barbie: math is hard. I meant 70 – 20 – 10 white, black and asian-american.
Posted 19 Jan 2010 at 10:32 am ¶
Gené wrote:
Great analysis. One aspect of myspace not mentioned by your informants that influences my use of myspace and facebook is a slow internet connection. I can’t afford cable or DSL so I have to use dial up or go to the public library. Even though most of my friends and fav. musicians are on myspace, it usually takes a long time to load their pages (especially if they have a complicated layout) through dial up or on the old computers at my public library. Facebook, however, takes less time. I still can’t view videos or photos, but at least I can see what’s going on. So even with its tendency to be popular among upper class folks, facebook is a bit more accessible for someone like me who can’t afford a fast internet connection.
Posted 19 Jan 2010 at 11:01 am ¶
Kat wrote:
@ dersk: I am not the only one to read it as a White person, please check this out:
Who is Facebook?
If you contrast it with the orange men and women, it becomes more blatant.
From the comments there:
Endor 1:17 pm on April 15, 2009 | # | Reply
“when Facebook is charged with representing an individual, the avatar is white and male.”
No surprise there. Human = white male. All else is deviation.
People talking about “blankness” are right, in a sense, but missing the point. Why not use this odd orange color? Selecting white (even intending it to mean blankness) is still human =white and male. Think of all the forms with set defaults in the fields of “sex” and “ethnicity”. What are they virtually *always* set to?
Heather 2:48 pm on April 15, 2009 | # | Reply
OK, I guess I can see what people are talking about with the “blank” space rather than a “white” space. However, there’s still a certain head shape (tall and thin), hair texture (straight, if prone to cowlick) and clothing (button down shirt-see the collar outline?) included in information we are given about the “blank” space: these could all be seen as coded marks of whiteness, especially taken together.
Posted 19 Jan 2010 at 11:28 am ¶
Deaf Indian Muslim Anarchist wrote:
Dersk:
that avatar is still a male– and yes, I think it’s a white male.
I have always heard people who would call Myspace “ghetto” while Facebook is considered “classy” or “elegant.”
just for the record, I use Myspace and I avoid Facebook.
Posted 19 Jan 2010 at 11:42 am ¶
reallyneat wrote:
Wow. I was completely unaware of the techno divide between MySpace and Facebook. I definately didn’t know about the racial conotations and how Facebook started. In 2006 I graduated from high school and almost knew nothing about the two networking sites. I’m not a member of either and always considered them unneccessary. I saw both as “ghetto.”
It’s disheartening to hear how teens box people into cliques. I didn’t belong to one. My school was international. Different ethnic groups clustered together but it wasn’t exlusive xenophobia a la Columbine.
Posted 19 Jan 2010 at 12:00 pm ¶
A.Smith wrote:
Great post.
I often wonder how facebook’s beginnings effect the now. Created by a Harvard student (who probably fits the Harvard stereotype) for other Harvard students to keep up with each other. The name of the site, “facebook” is a reference to “facebooks” used at many private high schools — how did these little nuances effect things — especially once facebook opened up to everyone?
“One of the hardest parts of my job is to explain to people that what they are seeing, what they are experiencing, is not the same as what others are. Even if they’re using the same tools.”
I see this too in my work. I tell my friends all the time that the one thing I’ve learned in this job is “you and your 4 friends are 5 people and that’s all.”
We all have a really bad habit of assuming, as you say, that because we do something and we know a group of people who also do that thing, then everyone must do that thing which, when you think about it, is completely absurd.
Goes back to that aggravating question… “what’s average?”
I’ve been thinking about this on a larger scale as it relates to groupthink. That is, how are we socially taught that what the group thinks must be right…
Posted 19 Jan 2010 at 12:06 pm ¶
dersk wrote:
If you ask me, that icon is basically a blank slate and people are filling in their assumptions about social norms – or their assumptions about other people’s assumptions about gender and racial norms. If you look at that icon, the only real information it’s providing is that the person’s wearing a collared shirt. Or maybe a turtleneck.
Personally, I really dislike mySpace, mainly because it gives too much leeway for individual page design, it assumes that your language is that of the country in which your connection joins the Internet (apparently, our corporate connection is in Portugal) and won’t let you change it.
My guess is that the two sites will move towards their 0riginal intent – in the case of myspace, promotion of bands or groups; in the case of facebook, peer-to-peer discussions. And a crapload of dumb games designed to steal and resell your personalia.
Posted 19 Jan 2010 at 12:11 pm ¶
dersk wrote:
@A.Smith – maybe because I’m also an Ivy Leaguer and actually know a bunch of Harvard alumns, I’m not sure what the Harvard stereotype would be – other than a smart kid who’s probably not very good at hockey.
Posted 19 Jan 2010 at 12:48 pm ¶
dersk wrote:
@A.Smith – apropos your comment, I just came across this great quote from a skeptic blog (discussing homeopathy and other quackery):
“The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘fact’.”
Oh, I like that.
Posted 19 Jan 2010 at 1:18 pm ¶
Val wrote:
@Gené
You make great points that most people never consider.
Posted 19 Jan 2010 at 2:33 pm ¶
Gina wrote:
Since you’re researching this, you may already know about Eszter Hargittai’s work on web use, but I thought I’d pass along the link just in case. It’s very fascinating stuff – she does her research with students at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which is one of the most diverse campuses in the US. http://www.webuse.org/
Posted 19 Jan 2010 at 3:49 pm ¶
usha wrote:
This is something that’s been nagging at me for a few months. Since the app that quantified your friends list by demographics rolled contagious through my own friends list. Everyone I knew had friends just like ‘us’. Sure the ’sex’ was varied, and the ‘age’ just ranged. But everyone’s ‘political affiliation read like:
97% political party X.
It does seem pretty clear that at the end of the 20th century and the at the beginning of the 21st, those class striations do seem to run pretty consistently to party lines:
White, rural, and socioeconomically insecure?
White, rich and living on unearned income?
‘Conservative’.
Privileged and elaborately educated?
Working class in a major city?
‘Liberal’.
This is alarming for reasons of national stability, yes, but also on a more personal level: Jingo-insular is not the person I want to be.
With my thoughts to this, I’ve since taken a gimlet eye to the breakdowns in my friends list (and my friends in real life),
and I’m disconcerted by the results.
Racially, my friends are more widely varied than American census data (with a larger than typical, I’ll bet, dose of ‘mixed-race’), but we all have jobs of roughly equal prestige and reward (and I would posit that the differences in earning between 50k and 350k are largely window dressing in our modern America), and nearly everyone grew up ~just~ like I did.
Some rich, some privileged, and some both.
The kids of professors and artists, doctors and bonds traders and ceos.
In college towns and nice suburbs and in pleasant residential neighborhoods of major cities.
When I thought it through, I found that I have very few friends of less fortunate background, the very few that I have are all white, and none of them are on facebook.
I don’t know what to do with this very distasteful fact, and it has really cast a nasty shadow over my facebook enjoyment since I worked it out.
I know some of this comment is fairly unvarnished, I’m American, and I know class is NOT something that we discuss.
I hope that I have not said anything offensive.
Posted 19 Jan 2010 at 3:57 pm ¶
Sarsaparilla wrote:
I read the rough draft and it was very interesting, especially the quotes from the Times article at the end :
“My impression is that Myspace is for the
riffraff and Facebook is for the landed gentry.”
“Compared to Facebook, MySpace just seems like the other side of the tracks
– I’ll go there for fun, but I wouldn’t want to
live there.”
Posted 19 Jan 2010 at 5:49 pm ¶
Kendra wrote:
@ Gene:
I’m with you. Living with a very old computer and slow internet means long loading times. I avoid MySpace because it takes like 15 minutes to load a musician’s page. Facebook usually works within a few minutes, so I go there much more. It’s hard to upload photos, but I don’t have a digital camera anyway. Just another way my experience is different than other users’.
@usha:
“(and I would posit that the differences in earning between 50k and 350k are largely window dressing in our modern America)”
what are you saying here? I’m confused. I think the differences in earning between 50 and 350K are pretty damn serious, especially when you factor in the likelihood of a larger family earning at the bottom of that range.
Posted 19 Jan 2010 at 11:11 pm ¶
Danny wrote:
The best analogy for MySpace and Facebook would be the old strip mall on the other side of the tracks that got supplanted by the new modern indoor multi-level mall down town. I think an examination should lean more towards differences in class and economic status then just purely race, as well as where the user finds most of their peers. Remember Facebook’s numbers are only based on an estimate since the site does not ask for race as a profile feature, which is a lot more progressive than a job application is.
Also it’s hard to distill the site down to a race dynamic that is particular to just this country anymore, since its level of inclusion has continued to increase to the point where it has gone completely global.
Posted 20 Jan 2010 at 4:17 am ¶
usha wrote:
@Kendra
Just like someone who earns 350k a year, a single adult with a salary of 50k can afford to:
Provide themselves with health insurance/ quality health care.
Have some degree of choice in the place that they choose to live and the ability to provide themselves with a relatively safe, stable home.
Have access to high quality and organic food.
Is likely able to own a car if they choose to.
Is likely able to further their education if they choose to.
Is able to have access to high speed internet, if they choose.
Can this hypothetical individual who earns 50k a year afford to buy themselves whatever they want?
Of course not.
But they are able to provide themselves with a reasonable expectation of comfort and safety as I think most people in America would currently define it. And that is quite a bit more than is available to most people in the world, and even a great number of people in this country. And I think that that places this hypothetical individual in a privileged class.
If you are in that pay range and don’t feel as though you can support a large family, that’s a separate issue, and arguably your own decision.
I know that I would not feel comfortable with more than one child at my current salary level.
Posted 20 Jan 2010 at 5:05 pm ¶
A.Smith wrote:
@dersk — I’m an Ivy Leaguer as well.
Sounds like you don’t fit the stereotype and neither do I, but I run into it all the time (and thus, hesitate to tell people about where I got my degree from — they make this God-awful face that I hate)
Stereotypes typically don’t exist (that is read as true/worth identifying) within a group. Ask a black guy if he likes fried chicken and he’ll punch you in the face (well, maybe not, but he won’t be happy), but that doesn’t change the stereotype.
A race professor told me long ago “if a person (A) holds a belief about a group of people, meeting another person (B) from that group who defies what they believe will not change the belief. Rather, A will believe B to be an exception to the rule, rather than the rule itself.” — but all this is sorta off subject.
BTW, I like the quote you found as well. It’s very true.
Posted 21 Jan 2010 at 10:06 am ¶
Iggles wrote:
Wow, this is such an interesting discussion!
I joined Myspace back in 2004. By 2005 most of my friends were on it. However over time it got annoying how people would customize their page too much. Loud music, busy backgrounds, picking colors that clashed for the background and text.
When Facebook came along I was happy to join. Sure it was less customizable, but the uniform design made it easier to navigate. Also a major draw was that it was still limited to college students. I am not an Ivy Leaguer, but by that point my school was there.
It was nice to have a network that was basically an online group for everyone at my school. It felt safer than myspace — you could list your mailbox number without worrying about weirdos having your private info. Also anyone who contacted you was either a friend of friend or went to your school. Myspace was open to all and lost it’s appeal a bit when it opened to teenagers.
Now anyone can join Facebook too. As I am no longer a college student, that’s good in some respects. But if you are in the New York network, for example, that poses safety concerns. You have be aware of how much personal info you’re sharing. Cyber stalking, identity theft, and weirdos contacting you is going to be issue on any social networking site you join.
I am 25. Most of my friends are college graduates and joined Facebook during college. I think the reason why they flocked to Facebook was because it catered to colleges. The reason they are still there is because facebook is “in”. Let’s be real, people flock to what considered cool. When too many people discover it, it becomes uncool and they look for the next thing. I think eventually it’s going to happen to facebook too because it’s open to everyone (like facebook) it’s loses it’s niche. It’s popularity is a double edge sword.
When you get friend requests from your parents, the site has reached the tipping point. There’s already a facebook backlash happening with many people canceling their accounts.
Posted 22 Jan 2010 at 10:03 pm ¶