[Air-L] facebook ethnic diversity?

[Bertil Hatt]

I read it as a polite reply to (the hype over) danah boyd's blog post
on the differences between MySpace & Facebook: boyd herself never
reduced the argument to black vs. whites, but that's the reading
everybody had.  They had to reply to it, and they wisely avoided to
stirr up more flames at the time (their silence was a good pointer
that the intuition was onto something, as this study indicates). Now
that the result is far less “scandal prone” they closed the question
with an interesting approach. But the intended reader was the
science-skiming media, hence the rather sound methodolocial base, but
the not so academic presentation of the results: with some work, they
could have published somethign based on that for, say, ICWSM, but they
haven't (so far). Doing so, they also don't have to justify their use
of too much, too personal data — the kind no IRB would let any
academic handle.

By the way, I'd love to have some academic lobbying from you guys to
ask Facebook for some run time on that database: they have gold in
their hands to answer so many questions — and we are all interested
not in detailed data, but the statistical results. If we can negociate
that they let us run some scripts, provided those can't possibly
reveal any personal information, won't run against their corporate
interest, and could help social science, that would be amazing. Maybe
some Ivy League universities already pay for that. That offer would
lead to lots of interesting discussion on what makes Facebook users
different from the general Internet users, way more then what they can
have internally—something valuable for the company.

About doing the same study abroad:
Outside of Nothern America there are no universal, easy to study,
significant social class markers; where race carries a similar stigma
as it does in the US, such studies are often prohibited. I have no
doubt Facebook uses similar approaches for marketing purposes, but any
details would be commercially invaluable, and the insights probably as
“dull” as what they are in the US after a few years of significant
presence.