In the De-Friend Zone

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ccording to a study published last week, women are more likely than men to defriend people on their Facebook accounts, and are more likely to choose restrictive privacy settings. The study was conducted by the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project, and also found that men were more likely than women to post content online that they later regret.

The study found that 67% of women have deleted people from their social networking page, while only 58% of men said they had. Further, 67% of women said they had set their profiles to "private" so that only their friends could see it, while 48% of men said they had. Only 20% of people keep their profiles completely public.

67% of women have deleted people from their social networking page, while only 58% of men said they had.

As for posting regretable content, 15% of men said they have done so, but only eight percent of women said they had.

It's interesting to consider possible factors for both of these things; in our experience, women tend to receive more friend requests than men, and women might be more open to adding people they don't know very well, only to feel later that they only want people they are truly friends with on their Facebook page, while men may seem to be more apathetic to who views their page. As for regretable content, it's curious to imagine what that content might be. Could it be pictures of drunken debauchery, exclamations about sports teams who later become a let-down, or something else entirely?

These days, 93% of people who use social networking sites say they have an active Facebook profile. That number is up from 73% in 2009—a huge jump for just two years.

[Source: Google]