Quitting Facebook

Last month, data scientist Vicki Boykis posted an interesting article about the kind of data Facebook collects about you. It’s one of those articles that make you think: I really should delete my Facebook account - and then you don’t.

One could argue that Google search data illustrates how people relate to Facebook. People know Facebook isn’t good for them, but they can’t bring themselves to quit. However, when it’s time for New Year’s resolutions, they start googling how to delete their account.

UPDATE - Vicki Boykis just suggested to label major news events. In the past Google Trends had a feature that did just that, but I think they killed it. Of course, you can still do Google or Google News searches for a particular period. As a start I added two stories that may have contributed to the mid–2014 peak. Let’s see if other people come up with more.

Method

Note that the Google search data is per week so each data point really refers to the week starting at that date.

I wanted to do a chart like this in December last year, which would perhaps have been a more appropriate moment. However, I didn’t get consistent data out of Google Trends using search terms like quit facebook. The other day, after deleting my own Facebook account, I realised I had probably used the wrong search term. People don’t search for quit facebook but more likely for delete facebook - they’re looking for technical advice on how to delete their account.