Have you been infected with Facebook? Don’t worry, like a viral outbreak, Facebook use will explode before plummeting down to Myspace levels of obscurity, says a new study from Princeton University.
Researchers found that Facebook has “already reached the peak of its popularity and has entered a decline phase.”
How bad will it get? Facebook will lose “80 percent of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017,” according to the researchers. To explain why social networks are like infectious diseases, the study pointed to similar research done with ideas.
This study hasn’t been peer-reviewed and Facebook, which currently boasts 874 million users worldwide, would certainly object to being compared to a viral epidemic. But the company itself admitted in October to losing teen users. Later, a study by digital consultancy iStrategy Labs claimed that Facebook had 25 percent fewer teenage users in 2013 than it did in 2011. American teens are susceptible to a new virus called Snapchat.
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