A Meta Study Shows That Facebook Has Less Female Users Because Of Online Harassment
Have you ever had those experiences where some random uncle will text and tell you how pretty you are? A compliment I do not want a random internet creep to give me and I assume that all women feel similarly. And apparently, this has become the reason why most women do not want to use Facebook. In fact, a study by Meta says that Facebook’s female user count has gone down significantly over the years due to harassment.
When Meta Platforms disclosed Facebook’s first-ever quarterly decline in daily users on Feb. 2, its finance head cited rising mobile data prices as a specific impediment to growth in India, the company’s largest market. On the same day, the US tech company published the results of its own investigation of Facebook’s business in India on an internal employee forum. The investigation, which lasted two years through the end of 2021, discovered a variety of issues.
According to the new Meta research, many women have avoided the social media app because they are concerned about their safety and privacy. The report stated that there were concerns about content safety and inappropriate interaction which stopped women from using Facebook FB.
The internal study stated that “gender imbalance” was a major issue that Facebook had tried to address in India for years with minimal success. The report further added that while there is a gender discrepancy in internet use across India, the imbalance among Facebook users is even more pronounced. It added that online safety concerns and societal expectations are among the factors discouraging women from using the network.
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The researchers discovered that 79% of female Facebook users showed concern over content/photo misuse while 20-30% of total users in our country were assessed to have seen nudity on the platform during the last seven days. According to the internal assessment, India tends to have more negative content than other countries. According to the study, family disapproval was also a significant cause cited by women for not using Facebook.
One research slide depicted an image of an Indian woman going down the street wearing a saree that covered her head and face. Next to this photograph was the account of a woman who claimed to have received 367 friend requests from strangers, with intrusive comments on her photos. According to the woman, the comments ceased once she utilised the “locked profile” feature, referring to a feature launched by Facebook in India in 2020 that allows users to limit non-friends from accessing photographs and posts.
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According to the internal assessment, by June 2021, the function was loved by 34% of women users in India, but additional effort was needed to address the problem of poor Facebook uptake among women. Online safety advocates have chastised Facebook for not doing enough to protect women from abuse and harassment. In 2019, the site stated that it had a team dedicated to assuring women are kept safe by employing technology capabilities to delete anything considered harmful.
