Research: 44 percent American young people deleted Facebook app

About 44 percent of respondents in a major US survey of Facebook said they removed the app from their phone’s social network last year. In the elderly this was 12 percent. They took those steps after the Cambridge scandal this spring.

About 74 percent of respondents have either uninstalled the app, or temporarily stopped using Facebook or changed their privacy settings, Pew Research Center said. The investigation was conducted between May 29 and June 11, and thus after the outbreak of the Cambridge Facebook scandal in March. The scandal revealed that data company Cambridge Analytica had stolen private data from tens of millions of users and used it for targeted advertising in the 2016 US presidential election in favor of eventual winner Donald Trump.

It is mainly young people who have removed Facebook from their phones. In the group between 30 and 49 years, less than a quarter of the respondents removed the app. Pew did not ask how many people have deleted their accounts. However, 9 percent of the respondents said they have downloaded all the data that Facebook has from them.

The research results indicate that the Cambridge scandal has concrete consequences, at least in the United States. In April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied that the scandal is impacting the use of Facebook. Pew conducted the survey among approximately 4,500 respondents, 3,400 of whom are members of Facebook. The research bureau reports that the margin of error is around 2.8 percentage points.