Lies, damned lies, and the other one

• 29.08.2013 09:33 UTC+02:00
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An article on Adrants, pithily entitled This is How Facebook is Going to Die, claims that Facebook's demise will result as teenagers flock to other social networks to avoid their parents. In support of his hypothesis, Steve Hall states:

It's no secret services like Snapchat and the recently Yahoo!-acquired Tumblr have been heavily fueled by teen usage. In fact, a recent Survata survey found more 13-18-year-old teens (61%) use Tumblr than Facebook (55%).

Steve Hall, Adrants

Leaving aside the minor quibbles that this was not a recent Survata survey, but a survey conducted by Garry Tan using the Survata market research tool, this is not actually the full picture that Tan presented.

While it's true that 61% of 13–18 year olds use Tumblr and 55% use Facebook, the disparity in the 19–25 year group—one that Hall considers to be less fazed by parental Facebook usage—was similar, 57% and 52% respectively. This hardly supports the conclusion that teens are flocking away from Facebook.

But let's get geeky. Let's assume for a moment that the survey was completely unbiased—and, given how Survata collects data, that's a big assumption—and perform a Fisher's exact test* on the proportion of teenagers using Facebook compared to Tumblr. The difference is not statistically significant at the 5% level.

Not allowing a tedious issue like statistics to get in the way of a good (Ad)rant, Hall backs his numbers up with the inside scoop from one of those disaffected teenagers:

Perhaps, lending the best insight into this apparent shift by teens away from Facebook, 13-year-old Ruby Karp wrote in a Mashable article… "Let's say I get invited to a party, and there's underage drinking. I'm not drinking, but someone pulls out a camera. Even if I'm not carrying a red Solo cup, I could be photographed behind a girl doing shots. Later that week, the dumb-dumb decides to post photos from that 'amazing' party. If my mom saw I was at a party with drinking, even if I wasn't participating, I'd be dead. This isn't Facebook's fault, but it happens there." She's right. While every parent certainly wants to know what their teens are doing when they are out and about, Facebook fosters an almost creepy form of supervision. It's like having your parents supervise your Junior High prom. While parents want to be able to supervise their children at all times, children will attempt to avoid it like the plague.

Steve Hall, Adrants

What they've both missed from this scenario is that if some douchebag is gonna spoil Ruby's party-life by posting photos to Facebook, where her mother can see them, it'll happen whether Ruby's on Facebook herself or not. And Ruby will be so grounded for a month and a day!