The Internet may be seeing a new and quite strange rivalry budding, one between Facebook and Princeton University, since each has now published studies debunking the other.
Researchers at Princeton fired the opening salvo by publishing a study comparing Facebook to a viral disease that will have its outbreak then go away, NBC News reported. The study said the social media giant will lose "80 percent of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017."
The study took off immediately, but was soon criticized for using a flawed analogy. Slate's Will Oremus wrote Thursday that the Princeton researchers made "assumptions" and "leaps" in their paper's hypothesis.
"In the case of Myspace, the network's decline can also be likened to the spread of an infectious disease," he wrote of the study's comparison to the now-irrelevant social media site.
"[The point] is interesting, and less obvious than it might seem. As the authors acknowledge, social networks aren't like the flu in that there's no inherently predictable recovery rate," Oremus wrote. "That is, you don't necessarily join a social network with the expectation that you'll be over it in a week. So instead of comparing the decline of social networks to recovery from an illness, the authors make an interesting leap. They hypothesize instead that the decline of a social network is like the spread of an illness-that leaving is as contagious as joining."
Facebook answered Thursday with a study of their own. Mike Develin, the company's data scientist, posted the paper to his page stating, based on the school's Facebook likes, Princeton will lose all of its membership by 2021.
The Facebook research method was a clear dig at how the Princeton researchers determined the social media site's popularity is in decline. Oremus noted the Princeton researchers based their discovery on Google Trends, a tool that tracks how many people are searching for certain items.
As Develin wrote, the study used "Google search data to predict engagement trends, instead of studying the actual engagement trends."
Oremus noted that a similar research method would suggest that the search term "broadband" started to become unpopular in 2005, meaning high speed Internet would be on its way out.
The Princeton students who wrote the paper - graduated students studying mechanical and aerospace engineering - were tackling the subjects of epidemiology and social networking. They also published it online without peer review.
As Oremus noted, "Nothing sells on Facebook like another story about how Facebook is evil, uncool, or-best of all-doomed."
