It’s no secret that Facebook has been mostly white since its inception. The social media site was founded at Harvard University and quickly expanded to other Ivy League schools across the nation, places that aren’t exactly known to be beacons of racial diversity. Until recently.
“Latino Facebook users grew 167 percent compared to 21 percent among non-Hispanics from April 2010 to April 2011 according to comScore,” said Juan Proaño, President of Plus Three, a web design and technology company that works with organizations to promote social change. They recently conducted a survey of social networking sites to determine the growth for Latinos.
Like many of their white counterparts, “Latinos are using Facebook to stay connected with family and friends and to stay connected with their identity,” Proaño said in a press release.
Plus Three also surveyed the top 1,000 Facebook fan pages and found 32 Latinos celebrities among the top 1,000. Only three Latinos broke into the top 100. Shakira was the top Latina celebrity with 35 million fans and ranked number eight on the overall list followed by Selena Gomez at number thirty-five and Enrique Iglesias at number forty-eight.
These demographic changes online can have lasting affects on social networking sites, and can even make sites more racially segregated.
danah boyd, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, studies social networking sites and other intersections between technology and society. She was one of the first to point out segregation in online social networks: READ MORE
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