Fast facts: The tone of life on social networking sites

Thursday, February 16, 2012

85% of adult social networking site users say that their experience on the sites is that people are mostly kind, compared with 5% who say people they observe on the sites are mostly unkind and another 5% who say their answer depends on the situation.
68% of SNS users said they had an experience that made them feel good about themselves.
61% had experiences that made them feel closer to another person. (Many said they had both experiences.)
39% of SNS-using adults say they frequently see acts of generosity by other SNS users and another 36% say they sometimes see others behaving generously and helpfully. By comparison, 18% of SNS-using adults say they see helpful behavior “only once in a while” and 5% say they never see generosity exhibited by others on social networking sites.
15% of adult SNS users said they had an experience on the site that ended their friendship with someone. That is somewhat less than the 22% of SNS-using teens who reported having this problem.
12% of adult SNS users had an experience that resulted in a face-to-face argument or confrontation with someone. Fully 25% of SNS-using teens said this had happened to them as a result of their using the site.