Socioeconomic Inequalities in the Non/use of Facebook

Use and non-use of technology can occur in a variety of forms. This paper analyzes data from a probabilistic sample of 1000 US households to identify predictors for four different types of use and non-use of the social media site Facebook. The results make three important contributions. First, they demonstrate that many demographic and socioeconomic predictors of social media use and non-use identified in prior studies hold with a larger, more diverse sample. Second, they show how going beyond a binary distinction between use and non-use reveals inequalities in social media use and non-use not identified in prior work. Third, they contribute to ongoing discussions about the representativeness of social media data by showing which populations are, and are not, represented in samples drawn from social media.