On Facebook, ‘Friends of Friends’ Could Mean ‘Hundreds of Thousands’
You may not think you’re sharing with many people when using Facebook’s “Friends of Friends” privacy setting, but two degrees of separation actually goes a long way.
According to a new Pew study, Facebook users who share with friends of friends reach an average of 156,569 other people. Granted, that’s the mean average, which skews a bit high due to people who befriend pretty much everybody. But even the median user has a lot of reach, with 31,170 people connected through friends-of-friends.
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Statisticians probably figured this out a long time ago. After all, with the average Facebook user having 245 friends according to Pew, and the average friend of that user having 359 friends, one person’s reach can easily get into the tens of thousands even after you account for overlap. But for me, at least, Pew’s results are surprising,