Social Sites: Have You Pared Down Your Friends? And Did You Regret Your Choices?

Privacy management on social media sites

by Mary Madden, Pew Internet and American Life Project

OVERVIEW

Social network users are becoming more active in pruning and managing their accounts. Women and younger users tend to unfriend more than others.

About two-thirds of internet users use social networking sites (SNS) and all the major metrics for profile management are up, compared to 2009: 63% of them have deleted people from their “friends” lists, up from 56% in 2009; 44% have deleted comments made by others on their profile; and 37% have removed their names from photos that were tagged to identify them.

Some 67% of women who maintain a profile say they have deleted people from their network, compared with 58% of men. Likewise, young adults are more active unfrienders when compared with older users.

Read the full report for more details on these findings:

• Gender differences in setting privacy profiles and managing information
• Young adults and their efforts at “reputation management”
• Levels of difficulty in managing privacy controls on social networking sites
• Profile owners who regret their own posts

ABOUT THE SURVEY

This report is based on the findings of a survey on Americans’ use of the Internet. The results in this report are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International from April 26 to May 22, 2011, among a sample of 2,277 adults, age 18 and older.  Telephone interviews were conducted in English and Spanish by landline (1,522) and cell phone (755, including 346 without a landline phone). For results based on the total sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.  For results based Internet users (n=1,701), the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.