You come at the king of social media, you best not miss.
A couple of Princeton epidemiologists are finding that out Thursday, in the wake of a study they submitted with a rather questionable premise: that if you look at Facebook as an infectious disease, then 80% of its hardcore users may well have "recovered" and abandoned the service by 2018.
See also: No, Facebook is Not an Infectious Disease
It wasn't junk science, but it didn't exactly make sense either. We posted our own takedown of the study on Wednesday. Now Facebook has struck back in its own way, with a similar "study" that concludes Princeton will have no undergraduate students left by 2021.
"Using the same robust methodology featured in the paper, we attempted to find out more about this 'Princeton University'," wrote Facebook data scientist Mike Develin, his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. "You won't believe what we found!"
Develin finds a five-year-long decline in published journal articles from Princeton academics, and a similar drop in Google Trends results for the university. By correlating Google Trends and undergraduate applications, he concludes that "future generations will only be able to imagine this now-rubble institution."
The post contains a final slap at the epidemiology paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed: "every Like for this post counts as a peer review. Start reviewing!" Only then does the data scientist drop the pretense: "We love Princeton ... we wanted to give a fun reminder that not all research is created equal – and some methods of analysis lead to pretty crazy conclusions."
Develin is a quirky data scientist with a mischievous sense of humor, who has been known to set up a "Free Advice" table outside San Francisco's Ferry Building. As for the Princeton paper's authors, we doubt they'll fire back: "we would like to reserve comment until the completion of the peer review process," one told Mashable Wednesday.