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61 percent of Facebook users have taken a break from the site

Facebook has a billion active users, but most of them have been inactive at one time or another, a Pew survey finds.

 

Fidel Martinez

Internet Culture

Posted on Feb 6, 2013   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 1:52 am CDT

Facebook may have a billion active users, but that doesn’t mean that some of them aren’t checking out from time to time.

In fact, a new survey published by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project reveals that close to two-thirds of Facebook users in the United States have taken a hiatus from the pervasive social network.

The survey was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International on behalf of the Pew center. The PSRAI spoke with 1,006 adults living in the United States in December 2012 via telephone.

61 percent stated that they had walked away from Facebook for weeks at a time.

Of these, 21 percent said that they had taken time off because they were often too busy or didn’t have enough time to spend on the site. Another 10 percent cited that they thought the content their Facebook friends were posting wasn’t interesting. 9 percent of the respondents claimed that there was too much drama or gossip for them to stick around.

The same survey revealed that 20 percent of respondents said that they had an account at some point but no longer do.

Further cause for concern for the social network is that only 3 percent of people said that they were planning on spending more time on Facebook, while 27 percent intended to spend less time. The rest— 69 percent—say they’ll spend the same amount of time on the site as they did last year.

With these figures in mind, one dad may be rethinking his decision to give his daughter $200 to quit Facebook for a few months.

Photo via Maggie Byroo/Flickr

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*First Published: Feb 6, 2013, 7:44 pm CST