According to an American statistician, more than half of Facebook subscribers will be deceased people by 2098, which will partially make it a “virtual scimitar”.
Since humanity appeared on Earth until today, 108.2 billion people have been born and 93% of them have died, according to a demographer working for the Population Reference Bureau. On Facebook, this ratio is obviously not identical since its creation dates back to 2004, but one fine day in the year 2098, there will be more dead than alive who will be « holders » of an account on the famous network. social. Really ?
This information was relayed by the Fusion site in an article of March 4, 2016 and comes from a statistical study, in the form of an estimate, to the credit of Hachem Saddiki, doctoral student in statistics at the University of Massachusetts . To arrive at this estimate, Hashem Saddiki relied on several types of data.
It took into account the growth in the number of Facebook users (1.5 billion in 2015), the demographic profile of these same users as well as the mortality rate of the Centers for Disease Control, the American government agency in charge of control. and disease prevention. Regarding the demographic profile of users, the Statista site concluded at the beginning of 2015 that 26% of American users were aged 18 to 24 and that 10.6% were over 65 years old.
Inevitably, such an estimate should be considered with great caution. Indeed, Hashem Saddiki started from the premise that each of the user accounts would constitute a kind of memorial for their loved ones. However, this is currently not really the case: the relatives of a deceased person do not necessarily come to meditate on their wall. In addition, also considering that these same relatives can request the destruction of the deceased’s account, this therefore remains difficult to estimate.
It is possible to push a little further by mentioning the fact that the death rate in the United States is not representative of all Facebook users, as well as the consideration of Hashem Saddiki, and this without questioning , information that remains to be proven and dated: the stagnation in the growth of Facebook users.
The lack of details concerning the death rate and the growth of Facebook users therefore undermines the quality of this statistical study, especially if we are interested in the 53% of Facebook users who were between 16 and 34 years old in 2014, i.e. more than half. They will succumb during the 21st century, but will the social network still exist?
Sources: Slate — RTL — Clubic