Facebook hits back at user loss “research”
Facebook data scientist, Mike Develin, has laughed off recent research by Princeton University which claimed that the social network giant would lose 80% of its user base by 2017.
Two doctoral candidates in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University made the astonishing claims in a non-peer-reviewed paper published online at a scientific research archive.
The paper described Facebook as an infectious disease, experiencing a spike before its decline.
To reach the conclusion, the students applied a modified epidemiological model – used to study patterns, causes and effects of disease – to describe the dynamics of user activity of online social networks, using Google data that is publicly available.
“Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,” they wrote.
Their study said Facebook has been in decline in terms of data usage since 2012, and would experience a rapid decline in coming years, shrinking to 20% of its maximum size by December 2014.
A Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch that the Princeton report was “utter nonesense”.
“Utter nonsense”
In a paper responding to the Princeton claim, Facebook’s Devlin took a tongue-in-cheek approach in debunking the research.
Devlin used the university’s “correlation equals causation” approach, using similarly available data, to show that the Princeton would in fact have no students by 2021, and the world would run out of air by 2060.
To reach these shocking conclusions, Facebook data scientists turned to its own trending data, Google’s Trend index as well as Google Scholar, looking for matches to Princeton.
The scientists found that in all cases, terms associated with the university were in decline over the last several years.
“This trend suggests that Princeton will have only half its current enrollment by 2018, and by 2021 it will have no students at all,” Devlin wrote.
“While we are concerned for Princeton University, we are even more concerned about the fate of the planet — Google Trends for “air” have also been declining steadily, and our projections show that by the year 2060 there will be no air left.”
Moving away from his sarcastic response to the report, Devlin said that he obviously doesn’t believe Princeton would be without students by 2021 (and that air would disappear) – and by extension, that Facebook would lose 80% of its users.
“As data scientists, his team just wanted to give a fun reminder that not all research is created equal – some methods of analysis lead to pretty crazy conclusions,” he said.
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