Dead People Will Outnumber The Living On Facebook Sooner Than You Think

Any teen will tell you that Facebook is dying. Now there's solid evidence for it.

According to an online legacy planning company called the Digital Beyond, out of the 1.5 billion people using Facebook, millions of them are currently dead. When a social-media savvy person dies in this digital age, loved ones often keep their profiles up as memorial pages.

If that trend continues, when will Facebook memorial pages outnumber the active profiles of the living? That was the question Fusion asked statistician Hachem Sadikki, a Ph.D. candidate in statistics at University of Massachusetts.

Taking into account Facebook's growth, the demographic data about its existing global users and death rates from the Centers for Disease Control, Sadikki crunched a lot of numbers to build a model that could make an accurate prediction. And the year he came up with?

2098.

By the end of the century, there could be more dead people on Facebook than live ones. While that's a pretty morbid thought to kickstart your weekend, it's helpful information to have. For instance, don't post any drunken pictures of you at the club unless you'd also want that pic on your tombstone.

Happy Friday, everyone!

Citations: We calculated the year dead people on Facebook could outnumber the living (Fusion)