Wonder how many of those 40000+ mentions were bots? If Facebook is manipulated to shift elections, why wouldn't we expect Twitter be manipulated to shift social media platforms?

Also, I suspect many millions have already abandoned facebook and were using other platforms, they just left their account around just in case. Now, they have a wee bit of signaling, for practically no cost, so they go delete their account, and can happily pronounce on whatever currently-popular- social media platform, how they "dont even have" a facebook account triumphantly (no doubt missing the irony).

I would say most people on Facebook aren't on Twitter, so this isn't a great sample and thus it is hard to know yet. The thing that could go against FB is exactly what made it grow fast - the network effect.

> And Facebook has 2 billion users.

I simply do not believe 1/3 of the planet is on Facebook.

I am not. Half of the planet does not have access to clean drinking water, I do not believe they are on Facebook either.

A good number of those two billion user accounts are not real people. They are either additional alternate identities a person had created, or out-and-out fiction.

So why even tout the figure? It's obviously inflated. I would be surprised is if it is 500M actual users.

What % of American voters users Facebook? I would be surprised to see over 80%. Nothing has adoption rates that high.

Yeah, I'm surprised every time I see that number that it doesn't seem to get much scrutiny. Furthermore, the claim is that they are monthly active users.

Only 1/2 of the planet is even on the Internet. Yet they have 2B MAU?

WeChat has a billion monthly active users, and they managed to do that mostly just in China and a few parts of Asia.

WhatsApp has 1.5 billion monthly actives.

It makes perfect sense that a global social network that dominates in most countries not named China, could get to two billion users.

I must have seen hundreds of skeptical statements on HN over the years about how Facebook can't have X number of users. I've never once seen any supporting evidence against their general scale. Not once, not ever. And again in this thread, skeptics and zero supporting evidence against Facebook having two billion users.

In their favor is extreme data: dozens of large and persistent research efforts put into studying use, by external parties. That spans everything from traditional media usage polling agencies, to large media ratings firms, to ad companies, to competitors, to services that see wide-spread use of Facebook-login, to Web traffic tracking services that indicate massive adoption. It also includes the massive usage that is seen on the iOS and Android app stores. The sole rebuttal possible, is to say: it's all fake! without any equally massive supporting evidence.

Companies like Google would have a very large interest in destroying Facebook by pointing it out, and Google would know as well as anyone if Facebook were lying to such an extreme degree.

> Half of the planet does not have access to clean drinking water

It's a lot easier to ship a phone somewhere than to ship clean drinking water.

(There are a lot of people who do not have access to clean water but have a cell phone.)

nitpick: World population is currently about 7.4 billion.

I have a feeling this will be a blip, but I also have a feeling this saga will lead to a qualitative change in the air. The level of trust FB has with the general public will fall. People will become more suspicious of it over time. It will make them vulnerable to being "disrupted" by some other service, technology, or philosophy.

But "2 billion" is the number they have to brag/do a sales pitch with. Heck, I have 3 accounts, one I rarely use and one I don't even remember the credentials any more.

Come to think of it, I have a 4th account. And how many do the botfarms have?

50K * 365 = 18.25M

But that's still only .00857 of 2.13 billion daily actives.

You just compared a yearly figure to a daily figure?

Well, GP did, but this shouldn't be that hard to comprehend. If for an entire year 50K users leave Facebook forever every day, the result would be FB's daily actives shrinking by eight and a half tenths of a percent … if one assumes that each of deactivating used Facebook daily.

FB loses appeal, people deleting their account is their smallest problem, it's the number of people who just stop using their FB account because it's not cool and cool people are not there.

If this catches on, FB can turn into Myspace in few years. It will still have billion or so active users, but FB's stock valuation will crash until it's P/E ratio will be something like 4-5.

But, how many of those people are active to any meaningful extent?

Also, Facebook relies on a critical mass of users; if 75% of my friends leave, I'll probably leave, then large swaths of the social networks begins unthreading?

If even 10% of my friends weren't there, I couldn't be planning events there for example. If you have to call or email a subset of people you might as well choose a different way of planning (e.g. invite people via email to a dedicated planning service).

So to me the value is that everyone I know is there. Not just 95% but 99%. So if even a fraction left, I could much easier just leave. My "social circle" on facebook could quickly just disappear, and I suspect this goes for lots of other people. Because the strength of facebook is that every social group is connected - but that will be how the cancer spreads too.

And here I am like: "If the taste makers leave, I will leave."

jk I've never Facebooked.

Check your number commas.

I think you dropped a zero somewhere along the way.

maybe this is how facebook finally turns into Gab.