If you are a very active Facebook user, you will definitely be shocked to know that your favorite social networking website is walking on the path of becoming the world’s largest virtual graveyard by the time this century will get over as the number of profiles of dead people will be more than the profiles of alive ones. This startling revelation is based on a research conducted by Hachem Sadikki, a statistician from the University of Massachusetts.
Hachem told Dailymail, “Social media website Facebook, which currently has 1.5 billion users worldwide, will turn into the world’s biggest virtual graveyard by 2098.”
This will take place because of the Facebook’s policy of not deleting accounts of dead users and changing them into a “memorialised” version.
The report reads, “Facebook’s refusal to automatically delete dead users and the plateauing membership of the site means that the living will be outnumbered sooner than you might think.”
Hachem’s research is based on the consideration that the growth of social networking giant will slow down soon and it won’t be bringing any change in its dead users policy.
Digital Beyond, a blogging company, has said that in 2016, around 9, 70,000 users of Facebook will lose their lives; the number is quite high in comparison to the figures for 2010 and 2012, which were 385,968 and 580,000 respectively.
Facebook users have also reported the incidents where they are getting birthday alerts for the dead ones. The social networking site has asked the users to appoint a “Legacy Contact” before they leave this world. The “Legacy Contact” will be authorized to access the page even after the user dies and write a last post. The legacy contact can also change the cover and profile photo.
Meanwhile, Facebook has chosen not to make any comment on the issue.