If Facebook continues to expand at current rates, the number of deceased users could reach as high as 4.9 billion before the end of the century, making it the world’s biggest graveyard, predict researchers from the University of Oxford.
The dead may outnumber the living on Facebook within 50years, a trend that will have grave implications for how we treat our digitalheritage in the future, said researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute(OII), a part of the university.
The analysis predicts that based on 2018 user levels, atleast 1.4 billion members will die before 2100. In this scenario, the deadcould outnumber the living by 2070.
“These statistics give rise to new and difficultquestions around who has the right to all this data, how should it be managedin the best interests of the families and friends of the deceased and its useby future historians to understand the past,” said lead author Carl Ohman,a doctoral candidate at the OII.
The analysis sets up two potential extreme scenarios,arguing that the future trend will fall somewhere in between.
The first scenario assumes that no new users join as of2018.
Under these conditions, Asia’s share of dead users increasesrapidly to account for nearly 44 per cent of the total by the end of thecentury.
“Nearly half of those profiles come from India andIndonesia, which together account for just under 279 million Facebookmortalities by 2100,” the researchers said.
The second scenario assumes that Facebook continues to growby its current rate of 13 per cent globally, every year, until each marketreaches saturation.
Under these conditions, Africa will make up a growing shareof dead users.
“The management of our digital remains will eventuallyaffect everyone who uses social media, since all of us will one day pass awayand leave our data behind,” said Ohman.
The predictions are based on data from the United Nations,which provide the expected number of mortalities and total populations forevery country in the world distributed by age, and Facebook data scraped fromthe company’s Audience Insights feature.
Facebook should invite historians, archivists,archaeologists and ethicists to participate in the process of curating the vastvolume of accumulated data that we leave behind as we pass away.
“This is not just about finding solutions that will besustainable for the next couple of years, but possibly for many decadesahead,” added study co-author David Watson, also a DPhil student at theOII.