Facebook and Twitter: Popularity, Access, and Privacy
Facebook and Twitter are among the most-visited Web sites in the United States, particularly among adolescents and young adults. As of 2013, 77 percent of adolescents used Facebook and 24 percent used Twitter (Madden et al. 2013b); among young adults, the corresponding percentages were 86 percent and 27 percent (Duggan and Brenner 2013). As a result, any alcohol-related content posted on these sites has the potential to reach a large proportion of adolescents and young adults. Several characteristics of social media sites can influence this risk of exposure to alcohol content, including the formats available for user posts and the options for and culture of anonymity and privacy. These issues are especially salient given that references to personal drinking could be incriminating for individuals under age 21. This section compares Facebook and Twitter with respect to these domains.
Over 1 billion people worldwide use Facebook (The Nielsen Company 2013). The site specifies a minimum age of 13 to participate in the network and requires the user to enter his or her age when creating an account, but there is evidence that children under age 13 participate in Facebook by providing a false age (Jernigan and Rushman 2014; Richtel and Helft 2011). When establishing an account, the Facebook user can create a profile listing numerous aspects of his or her identity, including birthday, hometown, schools attended, jobs held, and relationship status, which indicates whether someone is in a romantic relationship. Facebook requests that each user register with his or her real name and then use that full name as the identifier for the profile. An overwhelming majority (94.9 percent) of college students use their real names on Facebook (Tufekci 2008). Use of real names helps users identify and connect with individuals whom they know offline.
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The Facebook experience in 2014 centers on the user’s “wall” or “timeline,” where he or she displays status updates, photos, and other items. Users can control who is able to see the content on their timeline through a robust set of privacy settings. A majority of teens on Facebook report using these privacy settings (Madden et al. 2013a), but some studies suggest that adolescents may overestimate their understanding of how to establish and maintain private settings (Moreno et al. 2012b).
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Twitter is less commonly used than Facebook, with 215 million active users in 2013 (Kim 2013). Twitter posts, or tweets, are text messages of no more than 140 characters. Although adolescent participation in Twitter currently is less than participation in Facebook, the number of young users of this site is rapidly growing (Madden et al. 2013b). Twitter content often includes a hashtag, connoted by the pound sign followed by a keyword (e.g., #party, #beer). Keywords serve a unique function because they can be searched within Twitter by users to find content related to a particular topic. In contrast to Facebook, Twitter does not ask for the user’s age when creating an account, although their policies state that accounts of users discovered to be under age 13 will be deactivated. Madden and colleagues (2013a) found that 36 percent of 12-year-old Internet users reported falsifying their age to access a Web site or account. Twitter’s privacy settings are limited to either making content fully public or sharing it only with “followers” of the account. Twitter executives have said that 90 percent of the content on the site is fully public (Rao 2010). In 2013, only 24 percent of teen Twitter users reported keeping their tweets private, whereas 60 percent kept their Facebook profiles private (Madden et al. 2013b). Part of teens’ willingness to disclose information publicly on Twitter may stem from the fact that the company does not make any requests to use a person’s real name as the online username.
Both Facebook and Twitter are being used for research purposes, but with somewhat different modes of analysis. Thus, Facebook often is considered as a platform in which the unit of analysis is an individual identity expressed via a profile. In contrast, Twitter frequently is considered to be a platform in which the unit of analysis is a specific topic around which individual users may interact, congregate, or “follow.”
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