Nearly half of social media users deleted at least one account
Privacy concerns have prompted 40 percent of people to scrape at least one social media account, a new study found. Social media users are becoming more private. A lack of trust in websites like Twitter and Facebook has prompted 40 percent of people with social media accounts to delete at least one of them in the past year, new research by public relations agency Edelman found, moneyish.com wrote.
The ¿rm polled 9,000 people in Canada, China, France, Germany, Brazil, India, the United Arab Emirates, the UK and the US, and found collective outrage over repeated online privacy violations stemming from the Cambridge Analytica data leak and uncertainty about the truth in articles online as a result of the Russian-produced fake news that inàuenced the 2016 presidential election. What’s more, 48 percent surveyed said that it’s a brand’s fault if its advertising appears next to violent or hateful content, and 62 percent wanted more regulation on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. A whopping 2.6 billion people use social media across the globe.
The social networks are scrambling to do damage control. Facebook agreed to take down 270 pages and accounts in April posted by the Internet Research Agency, the Russian group that tried to inàuence the election. And last month, both Twitter and Facebook debuted stricter guidelines for political ads ahead of the midterm elections.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg also endured a two-day congressional testimony before House and Senate lawmakers in April, ¿elding questions regarding data collection, censorship, user privacy and whether the platform should be regulated after the social media platform allowed more than 50 million users’ data to be harvested by British consulting ¿rm Cambridge Analytica. Facebook revealed that it knew about the breach since 2015, but only just suspended the ¿rm from its platform this year. The controversy led to a #Deletefacebook movement, with users vowing to permanently leave the world’s largest social network. As a result, seven percent of Americans deleted the Facebook app from their phone over privacy concerns, and nine percent said they deleted their account altogether.