Six months after the revelations surrounding Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and the illegal harvesting of user data to manipulate public opinion ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Americans’ relationship with Facebook is complicated, to say the least.
The scandal severely damaged peoples’ trust in social media companies and many have changed their online behavior in response to it. According to a recent Pew Research survey, more than half of Facebook users (54 percent to be precise) in the United States have changed their privacy setting in the past 12 months, 42 percent have taken a Facebook break of several weeks within in last year and more than a quarter (26 percent) of the respondents have deleted the Facebook app from their devices.
Facebook is currently in the process of ensuring that the likes of Cambridge Analytica won't be able to exploit the social network’s user data in the future, but even if the company succeeds in doing so, a lot of damage has been done. If the scandal has brought one thing to people's attention, it’s the fact that social media usage does have a dark side and this awareness may come back to haunt Facebook in the long run.
Read Next: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter: Visualizing the Social Media Universe in 2018 (infographic)
This post was originally published on Statista.
The scandal severely damaged peoples’ trust in social media companies and many have changed their online behavior in response to it. According to a recent Pew Research survey, more than half of Facebook users (54 percent to be precise) in the United States have changed their privacy setting in the past 12 months, 42 percent have taken a Facebook break of several weeks within in last year and more than a quarter (26 percent) of the respondents have deleted the Facebook app from their devices.
Also Read: Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google And Other Big Names And The Products That Made Them Big
Facebook is currently in the process of ensuring that the likes of Cambridge Analytica won't be able to exploit the social network’s user data in the future, but even if the company succeeds in doing so, a lot of damage has been done. If the scandal has brought one thing to people's attention, it’s the fact that social media usage does have a dark side and this awareness may come back to haunt Facebook in the long run.
Read Next: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter: Visualizing the Social Media Universe in 2018 (infographic)
This post was originally published on Statista.
