Facebook not only celebrated its birthday by releasing the updated degrees of separation statistic, but it also rolled out Friends Day Videos that stitch together special moments with friends on a user’s timeline; and new Best Friends and Friendship Sticker packs. So Donald Trump and Barack Obama are each a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of yours. Instead, it pushes data on how the famed “six degrees of separation” is actually less than four degrees on Facebook. At least among the 1.59 billion people on Facebook. That’s the idea that between any one of us and any other person, there are an average of 6 “friends of friends”. The average person is connected to everyone else on the planet (who uses Facebook) via 3.57 people, Facebook wrote in a blog post today. Within the United States, people are connected to each other by an average of 3.46 degrees.
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Facebook’s scientists created an algorithm to work out how separated its users are.
The post starts with a description of six degrees of separation: The notion that it takes just six social connections to link you with every human on Earth. The task was “monumental”, according to the company, as “the number of people reached grows very quickly with the degree of separation”.
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The results of Facebook’s study concur with other research that suggests the world is getting smaller. In 2011, researchers at Cornell, the Università degli Studi di Milano, and Facebook calculated the average degrees of separation was more like 3.74.
