Facebook Will be Overrun by Dead People Within 50 years, Researchers Say

According to new research from the Oxford Internet Institute, by 2070 the number of users on that are dead could outnumber the amount of living people using Facebook. The Institute predicts that at least 1.4 billion Facebook users will die before 2100, with the dead outnumbering the living in about 50 years. This could have serious implications for the manner in which the social media network stores our digital profiles.

The lead author of the study, Carl Ohman, said that, "These statistics give rise to new and difficult questions surrounding who has the right to this data, how should it be managed in the best interests of the families and friends of the deceased and its use by future historians to understand the past." Though Facebook is a for-profit firm, co-author David Watson says that there are also major public policy concerns. "Never before in history has such a vast archive of human behavior and culture been assembled in one place. Controlling this archive will, in a sense, be to control our history...It is also important to make sure that future generations can use our digital heritage to understand their history."

Many parts of the world is seeing a decline in new and continuing users of Facebook, either because of privacy concerns with the digital data as a whole or are turning to other social media applications. The study's predictions are based on data from the United Nations, which provided researchers with the expected number of deaths and total populations of each country in the world distributed by age, along with Facebook data from the company's Audience Insights feature.

See Christopher Carbone, Facebook Will be Overrun by Dead People Within 50 years, Researchers Say, Fox News, April 29, 2019.