Quitting Facebook: What's Behind the New Trend to Leave Social Networks?
| 18. September 2013
Facebook quitters, who remove their accounts, differ from Facebook users in several key ways.
Facebook quitters, who remove their accounts, differ from Facebook users in several key ways, as described by scientists around Stefan Stieger from the University of Vienna in an article in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.
If you are ready to commit "virtual identity suicide," delete your Facebook account, and say good-bye to social networking sites, you are not alone. A social networking counter movement is emerging, and Facebook quitters, who remove their accounts, differ from Facebook users in several key ways.
Stefan Stieger and coauthors from the Department of Basic Psychological Research and Research Methods at the University of Vienna compared more than 300 Facebook quitters to about an equal number of Facebook users. They recorded their responses to assessment measures focused on their level of concern over privacy, their tendency toward Internet addiction, and personality traits such as extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.
The authors report several significant differences that distinguish those who have decided to delete their Facebook accounts. The results are presented in the article, "Who Commits Virtual Identity Suicide? Differences in Privacy Concerns, Internet Addiction, and Personality Between Facebook Users and Quitters." This article is part of a special issue of Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking entitled "Social Media as a Research Environment.
"Given high profile stories such as WikiLeaks and the recent NSA surveillance reports, individual citizens are becoming increasingly more wary of cyber-related privacy concerns," says Brenda K. Wiederhold, Editor-in-Chief of Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, from the Interactive Media Institute, San Diego, CA. "With photo tags, profiling, and internet dependency issues, research such as Stefan Stieger's is very timely." (Alpha Galileo/red)
The paper "Who Commits Virtual Identity Suicide? Differences in Privacy Concerns, Internet Addiction, and Personality Between Facebook Users and Quitters" (authors: Stefan Stieger, Christoph Burger, Manuel Bohn, and Martin Voracek) was published in "Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking".