A PhD statistician from the University Of Massachusetts Hachem Sadikki has announced that by 2098 the number of people who are dead with Facebook accounts will outnumber the living.
He’s basing this prediction on the fact that Facebook refuses to delete the accounts of dead people – instead turning the page into a memorialised version of a profile – and that very few people have access to other people’s passwords and as such the accounts will stay online, long after anyone has the capability to log in to them. Sadikki has also accounted for the fact that Facebook growth is likely to slow down in the years before 2098, with younger people less likely to open accounts in the future.
Although he doesn’t have the exact figures, current stats on Facebook users dying seem to back up Sadikki’s findings. Online legacy planning company Digital Beyond estimate that 970,000 users will die this year, and in 2010 this number was 385,968 with 580,000 passing away in 2012.
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I suppose we shouldn’t really be surprised by this revelation – I mean most of the people reading this probably aren’t going to be with us in 2098 – but it’s still kind of morbid and gross to think that one day you’ll be looking through your Facebook friends list and most of them might be dead. That is just the way it goes though.
In any case, none of us will probably ever have to navigate a Facebook filled with dead people as chances are we’ll all be long gone too. So there is that at least. Hopefully all these terrible types of Facebook status update will have died out long before then as well.
