Facebook has fired back at a Princeton University study predicting the social media giant will die by 2017 in the snarkiest (i.e., best) way possible -- by creating its own study that says Princeton University will die out by 2021, along with the world. The tongue-in-cheek reply from Facebook pokes fun at the idea that the every "scientific" study is created equal.

Princeton's Doom-saying Study

Princeton released a study earlier this week that looked at the rising popularity of Facebook from an epidemiological perspective. That is, Princeton's researchers John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, of Princeton's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, looked at Facebook as a disease and forecast the growth and death curve based on Google search results for Facebook.

According to the Princeton research team's spectacular (and attention-getting) findings, as many as 80 percent of Facebook users will abandon the platform in the next three years. This, after Facebook has gained more than 1 billion monthly active users around the world and will experience its 10th anniversary this February, outlasting and outgrowing other social networks like Friendster and MySpace.

The research paper, titled "Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics," charted the number of times Google registered searches for Facebook by looking at Google Trends, finding the peak of Facebook's popularity (at least as a search term) happened in late 2012. The team then charted Facebook's possible demise using a modified epidemiological model called SIR (susceptible, infected, recovered), which is used to map the spread and passing of plagues. "Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models," said the research paper in explaining why they chose a modified SIR model to chart Facebook.

"Ideas are spread through communicative contact between different people who share ideas with each other. Idea manifesters ultimately lose interest with the idea and no longer manifest the idea, which can be thought of as the gain of 'immunity' to the idea," they wrote. Treating an idea as similar to a disease is not that crazy. The word "meme," which usually describes funny viral pictures on the internet actually originated with Richard Dawkins, the preeminent evolutionary biologist, who at the end of his book The Selfish Gene proposed the corollary "meme" to describe bits of ideas that get copied and spread. 

But besides basing their modifications on the SIR theory on the example of MySpace -- which certainly was a big social network, but was never as well executed as Facebook -- calling "Facebook" an "idea" similar to a meme is also a misstep. It's a public company and social networking platform: there's a whole lot more going on than just an idea now. Sure, Facebook is seeing a decline in web-based users and the youngest teens, but death in three years? Not unless Facebook did something incredibly stupid, like change it's layout to look like MySpace.

Facebook Fires Back

Rather than pick apart the Princeton study for its many ungrounded assumptions and questionable methodology, Facebook sarcastically made its own study, based on Google and Facebook data, which predicted Princeton University's demise by 2021.

"Using the same robust methodology featured in the paper, we attempted to find out more about this 'Princeton University' - and you won't believe what they we found!" starts the ironic findings from Facebook's counter-study. "In keeping with the scientific principle 'correlation equals causation,'" (for non-scientists, this is a common logical fallacy and not a scientific principle, except if you're lampooning bad research) "our research unequivocally demonstrated that Princeton may be in danger of disappearing entirely. Looking at page likes on Facebook, we find the following alarming trend:"

Facebook's look at Google Scholar results for "Princeton" also shows that the university is taking a nosedive into oblivion.

Facebook looked at other Princeton trends on the internet and decided that the university will only have half its current enrollment by 2018, and will disappear by 2021. To hammer in the fact that this is a parody study, Facebook also looked at Google Trends results for "air."

"While we are concerned for Princeton University, we are even more concerned about the fate of the planet - Google Trends for "air" have also been declining steadily, and our projections show that by the year 2060 there will be no air left."

Facebook ends by saying "as data scientists, we wanted to give a fun reminder that not all research is created equal - and some methods of analysis lead to pretty crazy conclusions."

The brilliant riposte to the Princeton study managed to debunk their claims, make people laugh, and remind us that not to take non-peer reviewed studies like Princeton's at face value. What could have been a defensive reaction turned into a brilliant PR move, with a confident (if snarky) tone. Facebook doesn't always hit it out of the park, but it did today.