A large-scale analysis of Facebook's user-base and user engagement growth

Understanding the evolution of the user base as well as the user engagement of online services is critical not only for the service operators but also for customers, investors, and users. While we can find research works addressing this issue in online services, such as Twitter, MySpace, or Google+, such detailed analysis is missing for Facebook, which is currently the largest online social network. This paper presents the first detailed study on the demographic and geographic composition and evolution of the user base and user engagement in Facebook over a period of three years. To this end, we have implemented a measurement methodology that leverages the marketing API of Facebook to retrieve actual information about the number of total users and the number of daily active users across 230 countries and age groups ranging between 13 and 65+. The conducted analysis reveals that Facebook is still growing and geographically expanding. Moreover, the growth pattern is heterogeneous across age groups, genders, and geographical regions. In particular, from a demography perspective, Facebook shows the lowest growth pattern among adolescents. Gender-based analysis showed that growth among men is still higher than the growth in women. Our geographical analysis reveals that while Facebook growth is slower in western countries, it has the fastest growth in the developing countries mainly located in Africa and Central Asia; analyzing the penetration of these countries also shows that these countries are at earlier stages of Facebook penetration. Leveraging external socioeconomic datasets, we also showed that this heterogeneous growth can be characterized by indicators, such as availability and access to Internet, Facebook popularity, and factors related with population growth and gender inequality.The work of Y. M. Kassa was supported by the European H2020 Project TYPES under Grant 653449. The work of R. Cuevas was supported in part by the European H2020 Project SMOOTH under Grant 786741, in part by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, through the 5GCity Project, under Grant TEC2016-76795-C6-3-R, and in part by the La Caixa Foundation under Agreement LCF/PR/MIT17/11820009. The work of A. Cuevas was supported in part by the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad, Spain, in part by the European Social Fund through the Ramón Y Cajal under Grant RyC-2015-17732, and in part by the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad, Spain, through the Project TEXEO, under Grant TEC2016-80339-R.Publicad

Analyzing gender inequality through large-scale Facebook advertising data

Online social media are information resources that can have a transformative power in society. While the Web was envisioned as an equalizing force that allows everyone to access information, the digital divide prevents large amounts of people from being present online. Online social media in particular are prone to gender inequality, an important issue given the link between social media use and employment. Understanding gender inequality in social media is a challenging task due to the necessity of data sources that can provide large-scale measurements across multiple countries. Here we show how the Facebook Gender Divide (FGD), a metric based on aggregated statistics of more than 1.4 Billion users in 217 countries, explains various aspects of worldwide gender inequality. Our analysis shows that the FGD encodes gender equality indices in education, health, and economic opportunity. We find gender differences in network externalities that suggest that using social media has an added value for women. Furthermore, we find that low values of the FGD are associated with increases in economic gender equality. Our results suggest that online social networks, while suffering evident gender imbalance, may lower the barriers that women have to access informational resources and help to narrow the economic gender gap

Analyzing gender inequality through large-scale Facebook advertising data

Online social media are information resources that can have a transformative power in society. While the Web was envisioned as an equalizing force that allows everyone to access information, the digital divide prevents large amounts of people from being present online. Online social media, in particular, are prone to gender inequality, an important issue given the link between social media use and employment. Understanding gender inequality in social media is a challenging task due to the necessity of data sources that can provide large-scale measurements across multiple countries. Here, we show how the Facebook Gender Divide (FGD), a metric based on aggregated statistics of more than 1.4 billion users in 217 countries, explains various aspects of worldwide gender inequality. Our analysis shows that the FGD encodes gender equality indices in education, health, and economic opportunity. We find gender differences in network externalities that suggest that using social media has an added value for women. Furthermore, we find that low values of the FGD are associated with increases in economic gender equality. Our results suggest that online social networks, while suffering evident gender imbalance, may lower the barriers that women have to access to informational resources and help to narrow the economic gender gap.We thank the Pew Research Center and the GWI for the access to their data to validate the FGD. D.G. acknowledges funding from the Vienna Science and Technology Fund through Vienna Research Group Grant “Emotional Well-Being in the Digital Society” VRG16-005. Y.M.K. acknowledges funding from H2020 (Horizon 2020) EU Project TYPES Grant 653449. A.C. acknowledges funding from H2020 EU Project SMOOTH (GDPR Compliance Cloud Platform for Micro Enterprises) Grant 768741 and Ramón y Cajal Grant RyC-2015-17732. E.M. acknowledges funding from Ministerio de Economía y Competividad (Spain) through Projects FIS2013- 47532-C3-3-P and FIS2016-78904-C3-3-P. R.C. acknowledges funding from H2020 EU project ReCRED (from real-world identities to privacy-preserving and attribute-based credentials for device-centric access control) Grant 653417.Publicad

Leveraging online advertising platforms to measure and characterize digital inegualities

As the Internet is becoming a fundamental aspect of the society serving as a de facto platform for social and business activities, traditional offline activities and services have remarkably migrated to the web. The presence and interaction of users on these platforms has created a large amount of digital trace which is being effectively exploited by businesses targeting users on these platforms. One of the main players in this regard is online advertising which is the underneath business that drives the majority of the most important online services such as social media, search engines, map services, etc. This has made online advertising a crucial Internet service in its own right. While the benefit of using these digital resources has been accepted widely pushing governments and organizations to improve their Internet coverage, there are major challenges that limit the society from enjoying their benefits. Together with transparency and privacy, digital inequality is the main challenge that the society faces today. In this thesis we propose a set of inexpensive and large scale methodologies that leverages datasets from online advertising systems to measure and characterize digital inequality on the web. Our methodologies consider various demographic, geographic and interest categories at global scale that advances the knowledge of the scientific community to better understand the challenges in the interplay between online services and users, specifically digital inequalities. In particular we present three main contributions in this context: (I) A methodology to measure the price variability assigned to users by the online advertising system. We created an advertising price comparison system that leverages the bidding data from four online advertising platforms that contributes to the transparency efforts to understand the economic value that online advertising system assigns to user profiles. Using this data we show that advertising price assigned to user profiles varies depending on the profile of the targeted user. (II) A methodology to leverage social media data for gender based digital inequality research. Efforts to understand global prevalence of gender based digital inequality and its interplay with socioeconomic inequalities are limited by lack of large scale representative dataset. Towards solving this problem we developed inexpensive methodologies using the Facebook online advertising platform to quantify the extent of digital inequality in access to social media and its relation with existing inequality indicators. (III) A methodology to measure and characterize user representation and growth variability on Facebook. Facebook is the most widely used social media platform connecting billions of people globally. However, little is known about composition and growth dynamic of this advertising driven social media giant. The main challenge in measuring these phenomena is due to lack of large scale representative dataset that describe the actual number of users and their activities on the social media. We address this problem by leveraging its online advertising platform to measure and characterize its global composition and growth based on age, gender, and country of location. In summary, the work presented in this thesis contributes to advance our knowledge of digital inequalities measured through social media and to develop methodologies for understanding important socioeconomic issues based on digital traces from social media and the Internet in general. It will motivate further research in the area to understand the extent and causes of digital inequalities in various aspects of the Internet considering different groups of societies. The reported findings and methodologies will also help lay foundation for informed policy development and research to close the gender gap and reduce digital inequalities worldwide.This work has been supported by IMDEA Networks InstitutePrograma de Doctorado en Ingeniería Telemática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Arturo Azcorra Saloña.- Secretario: Carlos Castillo Ocaranza.- Vocal: Gareth Tyso