50+ Crowd Behind Recent Social Media Growth

Poll of the Day: The olds are ruining Facebook for the rest of us.

A new poll on how many Canadians use social-networking websites finds that over the past two years, the percentage of people over the age of 50 using sites like Facebook has jumped from 39 per cent to 58 per cent. The Harris Decima poll found that all told, some 68 per cent of all Canadians are a member of at least one social network, an increase of 11 per cent from two years ago. Seeing as how social media use in the under-30 demographic has long been saturated, the growth was almost wholly due to older people finally getting around to signing up for Facebook to embarrass their children, plan school reunions, and complain about Barack Obama or whatever. Ninety-seven per cent of people using social media in Canada have a Facebook account, followed by Twitter, which just one-quarter of social networkers said they use. But that's still a massive increase from 2009, when just two per cent of social networkers said they used the micro-blogging site. Pitiful MySpace fell from 14 per cent of users to just four per cent.