Our recent note on cross-country friendships in Europe, which have been growing and display an interesting annual pattern: https://research.fb.com/facebook-friendships-in-europe/
In honor of International Cat Day we researched a few questions about the people who like cats and those like dogs: Who has more friends, cat people or dog people? Who's more likely to be single? What TV shows do we curl up to watch together? https://research.facebook.com/blog/cat-people-dog-people/
Data Science + AI + HCI = A more accessible world! We conducted a qualitative study with Cornell University last year to understand blind people's experience online, especially the challenges they have and the strategies they take for interacting with visual content. These findings informed how we designed automatic alternative (alt) text technology that we are releasing today!
https://research.facebook.com/…/how-blind-people-interact-…/
https://newsroom.fb.com/…/using-artificial-intelligence-to…/
Our latest study at the Journal of Labor Economics shows that both strong and weak ties are important to finding a job. Weak ties are important for their quantity, and strong ties for their quality.
Do jobs run in families? Are twins more likely than siblings to choose the same profession? https://research.facebook.com/blog/do-jobs-run-in-families-/
feeling supported.Our latest study at CSCW shows that when people share more difficult feelings on Facebook using the feeling annotation tool, like "feeling upset" or "feeling frustrated" they get far longer and more supportive comments.
Where do friends of Broncos and Panthers fans live? Which team's fans have the most fan friendships? We looked at patterns in the three billion friendships shared by 35 million NFL fans. Happy #FriendsDay and #SuperBowl week!
How connected are you to everyone else in the world? You've heard of "six degrees of separation"? The average is actually 3.57. Find your own score and read more here.
The Internet's effect on your well-being depends on how you use it. In a new paper, we compare two sets of longitudinal studies fifteen years apart on the effects of Internet use on well-being. In these two very different contexts the results are the same: Talking with close friends online is linked to improvements in well-being while talking to strangers is not. We also discuss some methodological challenges facing researchers in this field.
In honor of National Coming Out Day (October 11) and #SpiritDay (October 15), this post examines how some highly-public moments for the LGBT community affected support for this movement and the rate at which people came out on Facebook. https://research.facebook.com/…/america-s-coming-out-on-fa…/
The diversity and unity of India, as reflected in data.
The language of laughter... on Facebook. https://research.facebook.com/…/the-not-so-universal-langua…
Happy 4th of July! For your reading pleasure, a post about how people communicate with their Congressional representatives on Facebook.
By Monica Lee and Bogdan State
In an increasingly mobile world, Facebook is an important way many fathers and children connect with one another. So on this Father's Day, we celebrate fathers by analyzing over 141 million father-child relationships in 28 countries that are maintained in part on Facebook. Specifically, we look at fathers' and childr...en's distance from one other geographically and communicatively. We find that children tend to move away from their fathers as they grow up, and that middle-aged children communicate more with their fathers on Facebook than do other age groups. Analyzing the distance between fathers and children inspires us to think about how we can know fathers better. So we conclude with a brief look at the cultural interests of fathers on Facebook. Perhaps it can serve as next year's Fathers' Day shopping guide for those of us who don't keep in touch with Dad as much as we should.
Geographical Distance from Dad
First, we looked at how far from their fathers children at different ages live. Unsurprisingly, most children seem to move away from home in their twenties. Children in their teens tend to live very close to their fathers, whereas children in their twenties and thirties are increasingly likely to live far away from their parents. 
Once they reach their mid thirties, however, daughters' likelihood of living far from their fathers stabilizes; sons' likelihood does as well, but it rises once again as they reach their late 50s. Overall, fathers and daughters stay geographically closer to one another than fathers and sons. Fathers and daughters live, on average, just under 800 km apart when daughters settle into their adult homes during their mid-thirties. By comparison, fathers and sons live just under 1000 km apart as the sons reach their mid-thirties.
Communicating with Dad
Next, we examined how much fathers and children of different ages interact with each other. It turns out that communicative distance tends to contrast geographical distance. Below is the public messaging rate (comments and posts as a percentile score) between fathers and children over three months.
While geographical distance between fathers and children is greater among children who are in their twenties and thirties than among teenagers, father-child Facebook interaction rates are also greater. In general, fathers and daughters keep in touch more than fathers and sons do. For nearly every age group, the interaction rate between fathers and daughters is around 5% higher than that between fathers and sons. Interaction is most frequent for father-daughter pairs where the daughter is around 40 years old; at this age the average daughter's interaction rate with her father is near the 59th percentile. Interaction is most frequent for father-son pairs where the son is around 50 years old; at this age the average son's interaction rate with her father is near the 53rd percentile.
What to get Dad on Fathers' Day
As children get older, they become more likely to live far away from their fathers, and maybe few children keep in touch with Dad as much as they'd like. So it's no surprise that finding a good Fathers' Day gift is always difficult. But data science might help us figure out what to get dad this year. In the space of this blog post, it's hard for us to say much about your dad in particular, but there are certain things that dads in the U.S. tend to agree on. Listed below are the top ten music, movie, TV, sports, and entertainment pages most liked by dads in the following age groups, where number of likes is normalized by the page's overall popularity among U.S. users.
