Specifically, the authors conclude, “Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80 percent of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017.” 
 
 Will Oremus Will Oremus is Slate’s senior technology writer. Point A is fairly well documented by this point. Of particular interest was the innovative use of Google search data to predict engagement trends, instead of studying the actual engagement trends.
– Well this is pretty hilarious: Princeton researchers recently likened Facebook's spread to that of an infectious disease, and forecast (in part by using Google Trends) that 80% of users will abandon the site by 2017. Slate panned the study, calling it "fatally flawed," but that's nothing compared to Facebook's reaction. In the words of Valleywag, it "decided to be a total spazz." Valleywag picks up this post from Facebook data scientist Mike Develin, who flipped the study around to show that "Princeton will have only half its current enrollment by 2018, and by 2021 it will have no students at all." The cheeky post notes that Facebook's research is "in keeping with the scientific principle 'correlation equals causation'", and includes a "graph of scholarly scholarliness." Develin concludes, "future generations will only be able to imagine this now-rubble institution that once walked this earth." Further, more bad news! "Google Trends for 'air' have also been declining steadily, and our projections show that by the year 2060 there will be no air left." Click here to check out the post for yourself.