A new study is predicting the social networking site Facebook will lose most of its current users within three years.
A logo created from pictures of Facebook users in the company's data centre in Sweden. Photo: AFP
Researchers at Princeton University compare the spreading of social media to that of infectious diseases and say people are already becoming "immune" to the site.
The research, carried out by doctoral candidates John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, predicts Facebook will soon undergo a rapid decline - losing 80 percent of its users between 2015 and 2017.
The pair adopted the same model used by researchers to track epidemics, to study trends in the adoption and abandonment of Facebook by its users.
By combining that model with a reduction in the number of searches for Facebook on Google, they concluded Facebook will soon undergo a rapid decline.
A researcher of social media at Auckland University of Technology, Richard Pamatatau, is sceptical of the study saying Facebook is nothing like an epidemic because people choose to be signed up to it.
