U.S. Facebook Users Largely Unfazed by Recent Scandals

In response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that saw the data of millions of Facebook users illegitimately harvested and used to manipulate people ahead of the U.S. presidential election, many experts anticipated a mass exodus of users from Facebook. Now that the smoke has cleared and things have calmed down a bit, it appears as if, luckily for Facebook, most users are actually unfazed by recent events. According to an Ipsos poll conducted April 26-30 on behalf of Thomson Reuters, the vast majority of Facebook users in the United States haven’t limited their usage of the platform in response to the scandal.

While 18 percent of Facebook users responded that they use it less than they used to and another 4 percent have stopped using the site altogether, just 1 percent deleted their account recently. Conversely 26 percent of those polled have increased their Facebook usage and another 49 percent haven’t changed how frequently they use the world’s largest social media platform. While it’s hard not to read the results in connection with the Cambridge Analytica story, it should be noted that the respondents weren’t explicitly asked whether they changed their behavior in response to it. They were merely asked whether they had "recently" changed how frequently they use Facebook.