Facebook has rewritten the Kevin Bacon game.
Facebook Inc.FB -5.81% says we have way fewer than six degrees of separation to Kevin Bacon.
Facebook’s data science team crunched the numbers and found its users are separated by just 3.57 degrees, on average.
On average, the 1.6 billion people who check  Facebook monthly are “connected to every other person” by 3.5 other people, Facebook’s data team said in a post dated Thursday.
You’d think that as more people join the site, the degrees of separation might increase. Actually, it has shrunk over the past five years. In 2011, Facebook and academics from Cornell and the Università degli Studi di Milano in Italy found Facebook’s 721 million users were separated by 3.74 degrees.
Since then, the company has gone public, stretched into emerging markets and seen its user base more than double.
Facebook published the research to celebrate its 12th birthday. It named the day Friends Day.
The majority of Facebook users average between 2.9 and 4.2 degrees of separation. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is connected to everyone by 3.17 degrees. COO Sheryl Sandberg’s figure is 2.92.