facebook

More than 90% of online teens participate in social media, according to estimates from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Facebook is the largest of the social networking sites — according to company records, the number of Facebook users rose from 845 million to more than 1 billion over the period November 2011 to October 2012, or approximately 14% of the world population.

The strength of a university’s Facebook community may play a role in building brand loyalty among students.

Companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook have access to vast and rapidly growing amounts of personal data from their users. How this information should be stored and protected is part of the ongoing debate over online privacy. Although social networking sites and smartphone operating systems offer security preference options, it is unclear if merely offering these privacy controls within the application — and requiring users to proactively “opt in” — is sufficient.

The vast streams of digital data being produced are proving to be a goldmine for marketers and companies of all kinds, but they also are a promising source of information for journalists.

The announcement in May 2015 that nine news organizations, including the New York Times, NBC News, the BBC and BuzzFeed, would begin serving up some of their content natively to Facebook’s platform has been the subject of intense scrutiny in the media and publishing world.

Questions about how social media platforms may drive users into “filter bubbles” — increasingly like-minded communities whose views are reinforced and become more extreme — have been swirling for several years now. As the debate has developed in popular discourse, scholars and data scientists have continued to make insights on what is often referred to in the academic literature as online “homophily,” or colloquially as the “birds of a feather flock together” phenomenon.

Recent weeks have brought a deluge of new findings about the digital media space, crowned by the Pew Research Journalism Project’s 2014 State of the News Media report.