1. A Big Data approach
to measuring civic engagement, gender differences
and usage in social media among young people
Petter Bae Brandtzaeg, SINTEF,
pbb@sintef.no
El Congreso Online Comunicación y Sociedad Digital
Universidad Internacional de La Rioja
MADRID, 18.04.2013

2. The amount of data in our world has been
exploding, and analyzing large data sets—so-
called big data—will become a key basis to
understand our society – digital society in the
future
Photo source: http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2013/03/is-big-data-the-next-big-thing-two.html 2

3. Big Data
90% of the data in the world today has been
created in the last two years alone (Source, IBM:
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/)
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4. The research question
How can we use "big data" to understand gender
differences, and cross-country differences among
young people and their civic engagement on
Facebook?
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5. Why measuring civic engagement
on Facebook?
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6. delTA 6

7. ‖We use Facebook to
schedule the
protests, Twitter to
coordinate, and YouTube
to tell the world.‖
Source: The Cascading Effects of the Arab Spring
http://www.miller-mccune.com/politics/the-cascading-effects-of-the-arab-spring-28575/

8. Social media - a new and promising arena
for civic engagement
Social media has been increasingly recognized as a rising force that plays a key role in
social, democratic, and political issues (Golbeck, 2012).

9. Informal types of engagement
within social media
Young people to day report to distance themselves
from aspects of formal citizenship, such as political
parties and involvement in local governmental
political issues, and prefer informal types of
engagement within social media which often have
higher relatedness and, thus, often are associated
with causes initiated by young people themselves.
(Brandtzæg, Følstad, Mainsah, 2012)
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10. NGO – Non-Governmental org. or
civic org. => increasing presence
on Facebook
• Amnesty, WWF, Plan
International, and Save the
Children, are all using
Facebook actively
• These organizations, their
presence on Facebook, and
the differentiated patterns of
fans (likes) between males and
females are discussed in this
article.
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11. Why young people?
• Young people are crucial
agents with regard to peace
processes and political
stability on a local and global
scale (Tufte & Enghel, 2009)
• Youth is regarded as being at
the forefront of new media
uptake (e.g.
Christensen, 2011; Jenkins et
al., 2006).
delTA 11

12. All young people are on Facebook
“It’s just that everyone else is on
Facebook so you join up yourself"
(boy, 17 years)
Brandtzæg et al., (2010)
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13. Why gender differences?
• UNESCO recognizes that the gender
divide is the most significant form of
inequality, amplified by the digital
revolution (Primo, 2003).
• However, current research points towards
a paradigm shift, in the realm of new
media technologies (Pavlik, 2013).
• We are entering a new social era as a
result of SNSs such as
Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, which
may alter the gender divide.
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14. Why "big data"?
• The biggest technology trend today is big
data, due to it's great potential:
– It's more data than ever (e.g. digitalization) on
the web and particularly on social network 3,2 billion "likes" every day
sites like Facebook, due to the increasing
possibility for user generated content
– Young people’s self-disclosure (digital foot-
prints) in social media to both other users and
organizations, has revealed not only new
questions about their usage but also new
ways to harvest data (―big data‖) about their
engagement
– Large pools can be brought together and
analysed to reveal patterns about young
peoples civic engagement online
– We know that presidential campaigns in US
relied heavily on huge data sets to identify
donors to potential supporters.
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15. The "Big Data" in this study
Wisdom – a tool to aggregate data from Facebook.
Intelligent tool for data mining supporting demographic
pattern assessment of Facebook "likes"
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16. What, who, when
 What: Demographic pattern assessment of civic engagement in
Facebook
 Who: Facebook users (N = 19,370,443, average= 32 years, min.13
max.71+ years) This number corresponds with those people who have
opted-in to contribute their data anonymously to the Wisdom Network as
well as their friends
 When: March, 2013
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17. Overview of organizations covered in this study and their number of “likes"
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18. Results
Some examples
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19. Males are more politically and
information oriented than females

20. Females are more focused on
environmental and humanitarian child aid

21. 21

22. Cross-country comparison
• This study used Wisdom to compare young people in
different countries on the basis of their country
information in Facebook and psychographic profile in
relation to two psychographic segments associated with
civic engagement: ―Social Activist‖ and ―Environmentally
Aware.‖
• Psychographic segmentations are based on check-ins
and page likes (e.g. "Social Activists" = Fans who've
liked a significant number of pages related to
causes, non-profits, and non-governmental
organizations).
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23. Gender differences across countries
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24. Critiques of Big Data execution
Danah Boyd has raised concerns
about the use of big data in science
neglecting principles such as
choosing a representative sample by
being too concerned about actually
handling the huge amounts of data.
This approach may lead to results
bias in one way or another
• Source, Wikipedia, Big Data, 2013:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data
• Photo:http://dialogicalcoffeehouse.wordpress.com/2011/0
3/29/danah-boyd-new-media-and-discourse/
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25. Conclusion
• This study has shown that there is a great potential using Big Data to reveal
general patterns of gender difference and cross-country differences in
regard to civic engagement on Facebook among young people.
– Young males are more supportive than their female counterparts in politically
driven Facebook pages and are more interested in sites that focus on political
information and facts, including Wikipedia.
– Young females are somewhat more supportive toward environmental and
humanitarian organizations and causes than their male counterparts. These
differences might slightly support old gender stereotypes. Cooper (2006).
– In general - young females from Western countries (e.g., Spain, Norway, and the
US) seem to be more active in civic engagement on Facebook than their male
counterparts. While young females (as well as females in general) in India and
Iran has very low civic presence on Facebook.
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26. Thanks to
• The VERDIKT-programme in the
Norwegian Research Council – for
supporting the delTA-project and our
partners:
– Opinion Perduco
– Plan Norway
– NRK – Norwegian Broadcasting
– Amedia, Glomdalen (newspaper)
– Kongsvinger kommune (muncipal)
– AHO - Oslo School of Architecture and Design
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27. Questions ?
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