Please de-friend your ex: How people are using Facebook
A study by the Pew Research Center charts the habits of Facebook users. Shocker: People don't like it when their friends overshare.
According to the study, the two most irksome things about the network both -- in some form -- have to do with the types of things people share. Thirty-six percent of Facebook users "strongly dislike" when friends post too much info about themselves. Presumably, this has to do with your News Feed being cluttered by mundane posts about what a friend had for breakfast. While that is indeed annoying, 36 percent of Facebook users had another reasonable gripe about oversharing: having friends share information about you -- like photos or check-ins -- without first asking permission.
Another common Facebook trope is that users often feel a tinge of jealousy when they see others having fun during social activities -- brunch again! -- that they weren't included in. Turns out that fear of missing out only really affects a small minority of users, just 5 percent of those surveyed.
But jealousy may come into play another way. Twelve percent of Facebook users have been asked to de-friend someone on their network. (The figure jumps up to 19 percent when looking specifically at people age 18 to 29.) Twenty-two percent of users who have been asked to de-friend someone say that the request was specifically made to cut Facebook ties with a former romantic partner.
Among the other tidbits of note, many people "Like" and post comments to photos regularly, but only 10 percent change their statuses daily. Facebook as a company has also been making a bigger push in private messaging, even introducing a direct messaging feature for Instagram, the photo-sharing app it owns. According to the Pew survey, 19 percent of users send private Facebook messages on a daily basis.
The survey is based on telephone interviews conducted between August 7 and September 16, 2013, among a sample more than of 1,800 adults aged 18 and older, according to Pew.