Figure 1. Logo for 99 Days of Freedom. Facebook users who took the pledge were encouraged to change their profile picture to this image.

(Source: 99daysoffreedom.com)

99 Days of “Freedom”.

This is an idea of Merijn Straathof, the art director at the Dutch advertising firm, Just. He initially wanted to see if he could stay off of Facebook for 99 days, and it developed into a campaign — 99 Days of Freedom.

The campaign encouraged participants to change their profile picture to Figure 1, and post to their friends that they would be back in 99 days. They gave a pledge to try to avoid using both Facebook and any other Facebook-linked product or service.

Over 40,000 participants were contacted via email after 33, 66, and 99 days to fill out three surveys. Across the three surveys, about one fifth of people returned to Facebook before 99 days were over.

Table 1. The number of respondents and descriptive statistics for each survey. Gender includes female, male, and declined to report.

To see the analysis, read our next post 99 Days of Freedom: What do the adjectives reveal?

 

Reference

Baumer, E.P.S., Guha, S., Quan, E., Mimno, D., & Gay, G. (2015). How Non-use Experiences Influence the Likelihood of Social Media Reversion: Perceived Addiction, Boundary Negotiation, Subjective Mood, and Social Connections. Social Media + Society.