Death complicates a Facebook status
Study tracks a morbid future for social network
The dead are taking over Facebook. That morbid outcome was raised by academics at Oxford University in the U.K., and the broad implications are grave. The research suggests that Facebook members who have died will outnumber the living on the social networking site within 50 years.
“These statistics give rise to new and difficult questions around who has the right to all 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,” said lead author Carl Öhman, a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute.
The Oxford analysis predicts that, based on 2018 user levels, at least 1.4 billion members on Facebook will die before 2100, which would mean the number of dead there could surpass the living by 2070. And 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.
“The management of our digital remains will eventually affect everyone who uses social media since all of us will one day pass away and leave our data behind. But the totality of the deceased user profiles also amounts to something larger than the sum of its parts. It is, or will at least become, part of our global digital heritage.” Öhman says.
Along those lines, Öhman told USA TODAY that it is important to stress the rights and privacy of the departed.
“The demise of your biological body does not completely strip you of ethical rights such as privacy and dignity. Overall, Facebook has done a pretty good job in navigating these issues and has balanced the interests of the bereaved with those of the deceased.”
He adds that it is up to the bereaved families “to curate the digital legacies of their loved ones in ways they see that both accommodates their grief, and supports the community around the deceased in the best way.”
Öhman also asks, “How is Facebook going to make the storage of these billions of profiles commercially viable?” After all, what makes user data so valuable is because of its ties to targeted advertising. “But the dead do not consume, so what makes their storage costs worth it?”
Study co-author, David Watson, also an Oxford doctoral candidate, says it is “also important to make sure that future generations can use our digital heritage to understand their history.”
As part of their analysis, Öhman and Watson set up two potentially extreme scenarios. Under the first, they assumed that no new users join Facebook as of 2018. In that scenario, Asia’s share of dead users increases rapidly to account for nearly 44% of the total by the end of the century, with nearly half of those profiles coming from India and Indonesia.
The second scenario assumes that Facebook will continue to grow by its current rate of 13% globally every year, until each market reaches saturation. In this case, Africa will make up a growing share of dead users, with Nigeria accounting for more than 6% of the total. By contrast, Western users will represent a minority, with only the U.S. cracking the top 10.
Mortality rates in the study were calculated based on data from the United Nations.