Facebook Fakes

INTRODUCTION:

We used fake facebook accounts to test whether or not a person would accept a friend request from a person that they do not know outside of facebook. We interpreted that "accept" meant that the individual in question was willing to share his/her information with a stranger. A non-accept meant that the individual in question was not willing to share information with someone that they do not know on facebook. Data collection was targeted at different expected graduation years of the UO facebook class pages. We hypothesized that younger students within the UO would be more willing to share information with people they do not know outside of facebook.

PROPOSED METHODS:
People were added across each class pages in a non-selective manner. The results where recorded in a Google doc spreadsheet. Four fake facebook accounts were produced: two of them were male while two were female. It was decided that personal contact was to be kept to a minimum.

RESULTS:
Please refer to powerpoint for various results. 



Discussion:
As mentioned in the results, some people added us. We believe that this may be do to mutual friends or a carefree attitude to who is a "friend" on facebook. Though it appears that facebook wants people to add only those whom they know, some people don't seem to care. We believe that these people fit into the more social group of people.


PROBLEMS:
Some people just didn't get accepted and others got banned from adding peple


FUTURE STUDIES:
Will the results be different in five years?
What about other social groups?
...Other than U of O?

IMPROVEMENTS:
—If we had to do this again, we would be more organized. We should have added a set number of people for each account and grade. This would have allowed us to perform statistical tests to determine if there was a significant difference between the groups. Without this, there is no objective way to test our hypothesis.