Study: Facebook use tied to race, class, gender

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Status update: Facebook is ... the social-networking site of choice for white students.\nA new Northwestern University study suggests that students’ choice of social networking sites is connected to race, ethnicity and parents’ educational background.\nAfter studying the usage habits of 1,060 freshmen at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Eszter Hargittai, a sociology professor at Northwestern, found that each racial group had distinct social networking preferences.\nWhite students were more likely to use Facebook than any other social-networking site. Latino students were less likely to use Facebook than MySpace.com by a margin of 13 percentage points. Asian students, too, were heavy Facebook users but shied away from MySpace and gravitated to Xanga.com and Friendster.com in larger numbers than any other ethnic groups. Black students showed no statistical preference.\nThough the likelihood of a student using Facebook increased with his or her parents’ level of education, Hargittai said she found this did not alter racial tendencies.\nArt Cockfield, a Queen’s University law professor and member of its Internet watchdog group, The Surveillance Project in Kingston, Ontario, acknowledged that there might be some truth to Hargittai’s research.\n“The stereotype may be that the flashier social networking sites like MySpace may be attracting, culturally, people that are predisposed to those types of sites,” Cockfield said. “I think it’s very controversial, and it’s probably too soon to try to analyze why this is taking place.”\nCommunity Connect, a New York-based social-networking company, uses culture to attract its members, with sites like BlackPlanet, AsianAve.com, MiGente.com and the GLBT-focused Glee.com. The company “banks on” Facebook and MySpace ignoring the desire of ethnic groups to connect online, said Kay Madati, the company’s vice president of marketing.\n“It’s our core business proposition that people will center around culturally relevant issues and dialogue about things that connect them,” Madati said. “If MySpace or Facebook began to emphasize cultural relevance, we’d be out of business, but for whatever reason, that’s not part of their business plan.”\nFacebook, Friendster and Xanga did not return calls by press time. MySpace declined to comment about the study’s findings.