

Quitting Facebook: What's Behind the New Trend to Leave Social Networks? - galapago
http://medienportal.univie.ac.at/uniview/forschung/detailansicht/artikel/quitting-facebook-whats-behind-the-new-trend-to-leave-social-networks/

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greenyoda
_If you are ready to commit "virtual identity suicide," delete your Facebook
account, and say good-bye to social networking sites, you are not alone._

Quitting Facebook is hardly "virtual identity suicide". You can have an
identity on the web on your own terms by creating your own web site on your
own domain. People were doing that long before Facebook or any other social
network came along.

Unfortunately, this article doesn't really provide any information, only a
link to the original research paper:

[http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/cyber.2012.032...](http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/cyber.2012.0323)

The abstract of this paper says:

 _Social networking sites such as Facebook attract millions of users by
offering highly interactive social communications. Recently, a counter
movement of users has formed, deciding to leave social networks by quitting
their accounts (i.e., virtual identity suicide). To investigate whether
Facebook quitters (n=310) differ from Facebook users (n=321), we examined
privacy concerns, Internet addiction scores, and personality. We found
Facebook quitters to be significantly more cautious about their privacy,
having higher Internet addiction scores, and being more conscientious than
Facebook users. The main self-stated reason for committing virtual identity
suicide was privacy concerns (48 percent). Although the adequacy of privacy in
online communication has been questioned, privacy is still an important issue
in online social communications._

