By Lance Ulanoff From Mashable

“The future suggests that Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80% of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017.” That’s according to a pair of Princeton University researchers who liken Facebook adoption to an infection. Those who don’t join the social media platform are immunized, they say; those who leave Facebook are experiencing recovery.

If it sounds like junk science, it isn’t. Though I do think the researchers, despite their best efforts to use virus spread models to analyze the growth, adoption and decline of social networks, got pretty much everything wrong.

The study, which is still in draft form and has just been submitted to a peer review journal, came out of Princeton Universities Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. It aims to use epidemiology, the study of how infections spread, to predict and explain the growth and decline of online social networks.

Let’s put aside the infection analogy for a moment, and judge the study on its merits. The scientists started with a major social network: MySpace. Wait, what?

The researchers say they chose MySpace because it “is a particularly useful case study for model validation … it represents one of the largest OSNs (Online Social Networks) in history to exhibit the full life cycle of an OSN, from rise to fall.”

Since they were using Google Search Trends data to prove their theories, MySpace may seem the perfect lab rat. Its rise and fall occurred between 2004 and 2011. Google has data for all of those years.

But their theory is convoluted, and their premise ultimately flawed. Here’s why.

Swallow This

It all starts with ideas — or rather, the notion that ideas are like diseases. Ideas “have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,” the study says.

That sounds rational until you consider all the ideas that have spread and stuck — such as democracy, electricity and the theory of evolution.

Another key component of this theory is how people who lose interest in an idea are thought to “gain immunity to it.” I think you see where this is going.

If you believe that Facebook is like a disease and those who use it are infected, then, the researchers conclude, “potential OSN users are susceptible to joining the OSN through ‘infection’ by contact with a current OSN users.”

The paper doesn’t exactly explain how that contact occurs. I wonder if FOMO (fear of missing out) is a sort of contagion? That’s not such a crazy idea. If you hear your friends on are Facebook, or Snapchat for that matter, you might join up in order to avoid FOMO. But that doesn’t sound anything like the kind of contact that could cause an infection.

If all this is tying your brain in knots, then this quote might make it explode: “Finally, the recovered population compartment is analogous to the population of people who are opposed to joining the OSN.

This one really threw me. How can you recover if you were never infected? If you don’t join Facebook, or actively avoid doing so, aren’t you more accurately described as “immune?”

The effort to stick with this infectious disease analogy at all costs leads to passages like this, “In the context of OSNs, immunization against recovery would ensure that the OSN always grows in time.”

However, their model does not allow for consistent growth: “In the context of the irSIR model, all OSNs are expected to eventually decline.”

It’s a dire prediction, and if the model is to be believed, Facebook will suffer a 20% active user decline by the end of this year — or roughly 200 million people.

I’m not buying it, and I suspect the peer review journal may send it back for a rewrite. Still, the Princeton researchers did get a few things right.

Not All Wrong

This is the most compelling part of their argument: “In the context of OSN dynamics, R0 [Recovered] can be thought of as the first users to leave the OSN or a compartment of the population that resists joining the OSN altogether. This small initial compartment of OSN resistors is ultimately responsible for the abandonment of the OSN.”

To me, it sounds like they’re writing about teens. There are now regular reports suggesting that teens are abandoning or avoiding Facebook altogether. The data there is far from conclusive, but this model does help illustrate how teen disinterest in a Facebook “infection” might lead others in their peer group to leave or avoid Facebook altogether.

The impulse to leave a social network probably does spread like a virus. But I wouldn’t call it “recovery.” It’s leaving that’s the infection. As one person loses interest in a social network, those around them may lose interest, especially if they rely heavily on the absent person’s feed for engagement on the social network. That can certainly spread virally. The fewer people of direct interest to you on a social network, the more likely you are to abandon it.

However, it doesn’t take a formula to figure that out. As much as these researchers want to believe that these disease spread and decline models illustrate the lifespan of a social network, the argument simply doesn’t hold up.

MySpace didn’t decline because of this model. It fell into disuse because of mismanagement, first by its original owners, by NewsCorp which had no idea what to do with the once-vibrant social platform.

Facebook certainly could decline. The teen issue is not going away. However, as a product, Facebook is more powerful, organized and diversified that MySpace ever was. It has innumerable defenses against decline, not the least of which is new markets around the world.

I noticed, too, that the paper spends little time on Twitter. It gets a few mentions, but is never really addressed as a platform that’s grown up alongside MySpace and Facebook. Twitter is so fundamentally different from Facebook that I wondered how the disease model could apply to it. No one model can effectively encompass platforms with so many fundamental differences.

It should be noted that one of that paper’s authors, Joshua A. Spechler, has a Twitter account but hasn’t tweeted since 2011 . When I contacted him for comment on the paper, he wrote: “we would like to reserve comment until the completion of the peer review process.” (I also asked if they were active on Facebook, but have yet to receive a response.)

To be fair, I have, for the purposes of this post, radically simplified what is a very complex paper, complete with bell curves that appear to prove the researchers’ point. Yet, even after reading through the 11-page document, I don’t believe the model. People like me, who joined Facebook, Twitter and, yes, even MySpace way back when, do not feel we are dealing with an infection. We enjoy it. The networks are enriching us, not harming us.

I’m not ready for social network immunization or recovery. Are you?

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