Facebook has billions of users all around the world and has established itself as one of the most prominent social media platforms out there. But a recent research has indicated that in the next 50 years one particularly intriguing statistic is going to come about, one that would make Facebook seem like more of a graveyard than a social media platform.
This is because of the fact that in the next 50 years, the number of accounts belonging to dead users might just outstrip the number of accounts belonging to users that are still alive. The study was conducted by the University of Oxford researchers, and it shows that there might be a future for the social media platform that no one had thought of predicting at all.
The research concluded that by the year 2100 approximately 1.4 billion of the 2.3 billion users Facebook currently has will be dead. And if Facebook’s current annual growth rate of 13% manages to keep going into the rest of the century then the number of dead users on Facebook could end up becoming closer to 5 billion.
Facebook will probably have a role to play in the future for people trying to understand their history. I think that at one point in time Facebook will be pressured to take the digital rights of its deceased users quite seriously. I just feel that the question of digital rights will sometime in the near future (10 years) become pertinent.
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Facebook will be dead by 2070…
It’s like that with any system, if it lasts long enough. DropBox will have more files belonging to dead people than the living in 2070, and so on for GMail, YouTube etc. These Oxford researchers have too much time on their hands to point out the obvious. Given that most system have your date of birth or date of account creation, it’s a trivial task to archive old accounts.
I have always wondered why there’s no feature to alert them of accounts belonging to deceased users. Too many times you get birthday alerts of friends. Marwadzo mhani.