Social networking has become a very real part of many peoples experiences! So I'm glad there are studies being done on this. The internet community could definitely use more compassion. More people connecting over good things. Intentional use of social networking. (I envision classes/seminars for this. Social networking can be used for healing, after all...)

I also like to think showing compassion online AND in "real life" (online life is just as real) will tend to feed into each other.

In either scenario, you are representing yourself - in the digital or physical world. It's still *you* and people need to understand that their internet actions/words have a very real effect on others! (For all some of us talk of holding politicians/public figures accountable, I think some people forget we need to hold ourselves accountable as well!)

Glad this was studied. Thanks for reporting! :]

This is a very interesting concept. You often hear that people experience more negativity on social networking sites, but to have it in real numbers is very different from conjecture.

I wonder why this is the case? There is such a large difference between young people and adults, that I somehow doubt that social networking websites are, in and of themselves, the entire issue.

Something to take into account is that a friendship likely deteriorates gradually outside Facebook and problems people are having is then taken to Facebook, where it may or may not lead to something worse.

Basically is just another way for people to vent their frustrations, something they may have done with or without Facebook. The way the article talks about social networking websites makes it sound like there's something to the users of these sites. But I don't think it necessarily has to do with the website.

It would be interesting to see how people rated the importance of Facebook, or whatever other website they may use, for how they decided to proceed when having troubles with a friend.

There's a lot of lack of interpretation going on here. First of all, what people report only reflects what they *think* they are experiencing - it's in no way a measure of actual frequency of their experiences. There's all kinds of alternative explanations for these results - saliency, lay theories (i.e., people are aware that there's this idea that people are crueler online and therefore interpret their experiences within that framework and experience recall bias).Yet the information is presented here as if the graphs explain themselves, which is unhelpful if not downright unethical. (If one takes the wide view of the ethical obligations of social scientists to communicate one's findings meaningfully to the public, which I do.)

Also, the title of this article is absurd - there's nothing here that assesses compassion specifically and there no context for the question raised by the title. Are they compassionate *at all*? Why not? What evidence is there that they aren't? Are they *more or less* compassionate than they would be in other circumstances, or compared to non-users, etc. - that might be a more meaningful question, but it's hardly being addressed. The linked article does a better job of sticking to a realistic framing and interpretation, but given that relatively fewer people are likely to click through and read the full report, shouldn't this summary be as accurate as possible to its source?

I'm so tired of the reporting of research results in a way that is attention-grabbing but divorced from the original meaning of the research. It's bad enough when careless journalists do it to us - must we do it to ourselves?

I blame the trolls.

These graphs kind of feel like getting the answer "42" to life, the
universe, and everything.  It's kind of interesting that that number
came up, but really, impossible to interpret in any meaningful way.

The first graph has percent of people with SNS-associated negative
outcomes.  Fine.  But how on earth is one meant to interpret this
without any kind of context?  What percent of people have non-SNS
associated negative outcomes?  How does that compare to the percentage
of time spent on and off SNS?  Ditto for the third graph.  I can sort of extrapolate that a lot of negative (and postive) things happen related to SNS use, but that "a lot" is pretty hazy sense I can't actually compare the numbers to anything but the numbers for other types of negative and positive SNS events.  I can't even be sure that the SNS use is the cause or just an artifact of social time spent on the sites--things like ending a friendship might be happening at the exact same rates on SNS and in "real life."

I mean, there's a graph up there that says people who use a program more
frequently have more frequent events associated with that problem. 
Aside from the fact that groups of people who tend to use SNS more or less often are probably not directly comparable without some serious controls, that's basically the equivalent of saying people who drive more have more car accidents. 

the "negative outcomes occur more often to frequent SNS users" seems kind of obvious: if you spend more time in a social venue, more things will happen to you in that venue, be they positive, negative, or neutral.

These charts are interesting, but there's nothing here that would let us make conclusions about whether social networking sites are good or bad, or whether people who use them are compassionate or not.  The important question to ask would be, how often do these negative things happen to people who don't use social networking sites?  And how often do they result from other types of communication?  Personally, I bet if you made a chart like that first one, but of "how often have these negative things happened to you as a result of a phone call?"  it'd look pretty similar.  People have arguments, say things they shouldn't, and end friendships in all sorts of formats. 

This feels to me like it's only half the story. Sure, statistics on stuff that happens on social networks, but without any meaningful comparison to stuff that happens elsewhere (school? the workplace? at home?) I don't see how it in any way implies that social networks need more compassion. Do most people actually expect social networks to be 100% full of love and hugs?

Interesting statistics, pity we are losing the art of face to face interaction.
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http://goo.gl/Hx8vL

Facebook, and all other non-anonymous social networking sites, are simply another form of social interaction like hanging out at the mall or joining a rotary club. Indeed, these sns are the answer to the isolation experienced by the baby boomers when they started abandoning their old social networks with nothing to replace them. FB is the new bowling league or Masonic lodge.

So of course you're going to see more negative social outcomes and cruelty if you actually are social with a large group of people than if you sit at home watching television alone and only interact with one or two extremely close friends.

And then consider how tightly regimented all our other social contact is. In school and work, we're forced to present an artificial version of ourselves and hide our emotions so we can impress teachers and employers who have power over our futures. So if someone pisses us off at work, we smile and act like it's nothing, then vent online and end the friendship there, where there are fewer external consequences. 80 years ago we would have waited and done it at the church picnic. 40 years ago we wouldn't have been friends with that person outside of work anyway.

Seriously, I think we need to just ban anyone over the age of 30 from publishing "research" on modern social technology. ESPECIALLY boomers, who lacked even the flesh-and-blood interactions to compare it to. To understand the role of technology in the lives of people born after it's inception, you have to actually live in that world. To me, as a person who lived her whole life in a world where the internet is the major means of social contact, reading this stuff feels a lot like how, say, Amazonians who haven't been significantly impacted by Europeans describe their reactions to anthropology papers on their communities. 

It would seem that the more anonymous the contributers the worse their behavour.

Very poor use of X-axis scaling, here.

Surfing the internet and browsing social networking sites is a lot like being in a car in traffic (it even used to be called the "Information Superhighway"). It seems to me that flaming, trolling, and "cyber-bullying" are the online equivalents of road rage.

Road rage doesn't happen to pedestrians. Sure, pedestrians will get into conflicts and fights and such but they are much rarer and of a different character than the kinds of conflicts that commonly erupt between normally-civilized car drivers. Someone in a car who cuts in front of another driver and forces them to hit the brakes can elicit a torrent of obscenities and gestures and even the use of firearms, but if pedestrians bump into each other while crossing the street, the individuals involved make a slight correction to their course and carry on without any screaming fits or outbreaks of violence (in the vast majority of cases).

The difference seems to be that pedestrians see each other face to face whereas car drivers are sealed in little boxes (much like how people sit in their house while browsing social networks). Since so much human interaction involves subtle behavioral cues that in many cases are perceived subconsciously, pedestrians are able to express a non-aggressive, apologetic attitude about accidentally bumping into someone and can detect the same being expressed towards them by the other party with a half-second glance at each others' faces.

While driving in our cars or at home sitting at our computers we lack this complex and highly-evolved way of assessing the intent of those we suddenly find ourselves in conflict with; was their cutting me off an unintended accident or were they intentionally trying to start trouble? With no face to explore for more data, our default response seems to be to assume the worst and respond accordingly. That may have been a reasonable survival strategy at an earlier stage of human evolution, but it's really starting to become a problem now.

So, I guess I'd say that social networking site users are as compassionate as any random group of individuals, but only when they encounter other people face to face. When they're online or get into their car, all bets about compassion are off.

Just want to re-iterate the point made by  jadehawk — of course negative outcomes of SNS use occur more frequently to frequent SNS users. We should expect any outcome of SNS use to occur more frequently to frequent SNS users.