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# The End of Men: "Self-Censorship" on Facebook Edition
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/the-end-of-men-self-censorship-on-facebook-edition/
- Published: 2013-12-30T19:11:36.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:34:04.000Z
- Description: A new study analyzing 3.9 million English-speaking Facebook users has concluded that 71% of status updates are "self-censored" — that is, modified prior to posting.
- Author: Mostafa Heddaya
- Tags: Opinion, Censorship, Facebook, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 06:59 (2012, 2013, part 2)

![(image via Flickr user TK)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2013/12/5880012372_d32d86e22a_z.jpg)

(image via Flickr user jonseidman88)

A new study analyzing 3.9 million English-speaking Facebook users has concluded that 71% of status updates are “self-censored” — that is, modified prior to posting. The research, [highlighted by Slate](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future%5Ftense/2013/12/facebook%5Fself%5Fcensorship%5Fwhat%5Fhappens%5Fto%5Fthe%5Fposts%5Fyou%5Fdon%5Ft%5Fpublish.html?ref=hyperallergic.com) for its incidental implications for privacy and data-collection practices at the social networking behemoth, was undertaken by Sauvik Das, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, and Adam Kramer, a data scientist at Facebook.

Though we wish the study’s [paper](http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM13/paper/viewFile/6093/6350?ref=hyperallergic.com), presented at the Seventh International [AAAI](http://www.aaai.org/home.html?ref=hyperallergic.com) Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, broke out the effect by age at a greater degree of granularity, the revealed demographic factors behind such self-editing are interesting. Das and Kramer summarize the key results:

> Posts are censored more than comments (33% vs. 13%). Also, we found that decisions to self-censor content strongly affected \[*sic*\] by a user’s perception of audience: Users who target specific audiences self-censor more than users who do not. *We also found that males censor more posts, but, surprisingly, also that males censor more than females when more of their friends are male.* Additionally, we found that people with more boundaries to regulate censor more posts; older users censor fewer posts but more comments; and, people with more politically and age diverse friends censor fewer posts. \[emphasis added\]

Explaining that “a user’s ‘perceived audience’ lies at the heart of the issue,” Das and Kramer’s findings build a case for understanding expression on social networking sites as synthetically inhibited. Of course, the ‘[performed](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAqZb52sgpU&ref=hyperallergic.com),’ ‘edited,’ ‘self-censored’ (or what have you) element of self-expression is universal, but studies such as this one help attenuate thenotion that identity-based online transmissions of text and (self-)image somehow give rise to a new kind of subjectivity.

Social network transmissions are audience-determined, just like a letter or telegraph or headshot or self-portrait, and subject to tailoring and revisions. In other words — shocker! — the lexicon of expression on new forms of media demonstrates the same key behavior that governed old forms of media, rather than catalyzing a novel paradigm for self-expression. And, as one might expect of researchers working for the entity providing the data being studied (Das held a summer position at Facebook), the paper’s painful word choice dramatizes the observed effect. Does anyone call editing a holiday card “censorship”?