CAMBRIDGE, MA – Harvard School of Business released the results from a year long study today, concluding that Facebook users “friends” are not always their friends in real life.
“We gathered data on over 1 million users from 10 different countries” explained principal investigator James Norton. “We discovered that on average, people can no longer stand around 15.4% of their friends list and in many cases never liked them in the first place.”
The study goes on to list some of the reasons for people not liking their current Facebook friends, with the most popular being posting photos of every meal they eat, too many professional pictures of them and their significant other frolicking and laughing in a forest, and posting pseudoscience bullshit about vaccines and conspiracy theories.
“Our advice is to un-friend the people who either annoy or anger you on Facebook. Doing some housekeeping on your social media is never a bad idea” says Norton.
The researchers are also in the early stages of a similar study on Twitter, examining how users can’t stand certain people, but still choose to follow them.
