This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. Did you know that based on a study by Facebook done in 2011, the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was 4.74. Not everyone is impressed with Facebook using its own numbers to make assumptions about the general population.Ī sarcastic post in Gizmodo reads in part, 'Facebook’s comparing it to the popular theory of six degrees of separation - presenting its user base and the general population as two groups that, hell, may as well be considered one in the same!'īrooke Fox is a student at University of Colorado at Boulder and a USA TODAY College digital producer. DEGREES OF SEPARATION IS AVAILABLE NOW Unleash the powers of hot and cold and embark on a journey with Ember & Rime in the visually sensational world of Degrees of Separation. According to a study done by social media monitoring firm Sysomos in 2010, the average Degrees of Separation between users on Twitter is 4.67. Facebook says analyzing the data is not easy. That’s WAY less than the 6 degrees of separation that was reported before social media and the internet was in full force. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a 3.17 degrees of separation, but COO Sheryl Sandberg is much closer with 2.92.

'Now, with twice as many people using the site, we've grown more interconnected, thus shortening the distance between any two people in the world,' said Facebook. So this post is mostly to show you that Facebook reports that people are, on average, only separated by 3.57 people on their platform.

The world is getting smaller, at least according to Facebook, which on Thursday announced that among the 1.59 billion active Facebook users, each person is connected to every other person by an average of 3.57 people.īack in 2011, Facebook and researchers at Cornell and the Università degli Studi di Milano said they had punched a hole in the 'six degrees of separation' theory when they computed the average across the 721 million people then using the site then, and found that it was 3.74.Īnd that number, it claimed, had shattered the (questionable) theory that everyone is separated by six degrees of separation.

Degrees of separation facebook