Facebook (Meta) Overview

Facebook (Meta)

Facebook is an American social networking website and a product of Meta Platforms. Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes—all Harvard University students at the time—founded Facebook in 2004. As of 2021, Facebook had about three billion users, about half of whom used it daily, making it the largest social network in the world. Menlo Park, California serves as the company’s corporate headquarters.

At a young age, Mark Zuckerberg started down his path. Zuckerberg’s father Edward taught him Atari BASIC computer programming since he knew how important coding was. His abilities became clear rather quickly. His parents recruited David Newman, a software expert, to instruct him when he was 11 years old. Zuckerberg is still referred to as a “prodigy” by Newman.

Within a few years, Zuckerberg developed ZuckNet, a tool that is immensely useful. His father operated a dental office out of their home; therefore, he needed an easy way for the receptionist to get in touch with him without shouting across their house. That was what ZuckNet, which functioned like an internal instant messaging system, did.

His desire to create persisted even while he was a student at the exclusive boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy. AOL and Microsoft showed great interest in him. The wanted to hire him and buy Synapse, a piece of software they co-created that used AI to learn a user’s musical preferences. He ultimately declined it and decided to attend Harvard instead. The beginnings of Facebook can be traced here. He probably won’t change his mind about it now.

In 2002, after declining two of the biggest tech firms in the world, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard. He had obviously grander ideas. He decided to major in psychology while also taking a lot of computer science courses. The choice of psychology initially strikes me as odd. Why not declare a major in programming or a related field? But the psychology component becomes more obvious when you consider Facebook’s nature and the allegedly “addictive” nature of the likes, comments, and pokes. Facebook immediately draws you in to disclose personal information and look for social engagement. It must take some understanding of the human psyche to be able to design anything like this.

In October2003, Zuckerberg stirs up his first significant controversy. He developed and released Facemash, a website that allows Harvard students to rank each other’s attractiveness (similar to the Hot or Not site that launched in 2000). Unsurprisingly, many people weren’t pleased with his work because he didn’t truly have permission to utilize student images. The site received 22k photo views in a matter of hours, however it was shut down a few days later. The Harvard Administration Board called him before them. The board ultimately chose to let him continue despite the possibility of dismissal. He moved on from his first run-in with the law after making a public apology and focused on his next endeavor.

We soon witnessed the original form of a business that is now all but omnipresent. Launched on February of2004, Thefacebook. The platform had a name that was somewhat unfamiliar. It had a profile where users could express their hobbies, add photos, and connect with others. A network representation of your connections was also available. Within the first month of being available to anyone with a Harvard email account, 50% of the college’s students had signed up. But Zuckerberg had to deal with a significant issue right away. Someone was suing him.

Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, who were all classmates of Zuckerberg’s, collaborated on a previous endeavor along similar line. He eventually gave up his job to focus on Facebook. However, the ex-collaborators claim that he stole their ideas and concepts, and they sought compensation. In 2008, they finally reached a settlement, with each of the three obtaining 1.2 million shares in the Facebook corporation. These had a value of $300 million by the IPO.

The popularity of Facebook increased steadily over time. Nearly all universities in the US and Canada were able to join by the end of2004, and interest in joining was high. In June of that same year, Zuckerberg also relocated the company’s operations to Palo Alto, California, and attracted some significant funding. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, joined the board and contributed $500,000.

TheFacebook received extra funding in May 2005. This time, investments totaling $12.7 million from Accel and $1 million came from Jim Breyer’s personal wealth, a venture capitalist. Now, many were paying close attention. The ‘the’ was eliminated in August, and the business became known as Facebook (the facebook.com domain cost $200,000). High school pupils as well as Microsoft and Apple personnel are admitted the following month. The business was now prepared to expand beyond its student clientele. Then, in November, Zuckerberg made a significant life decision. He announced his complete departure from Harvard after taking the semester off and making a quick stopover to hire some new staff. Zuckerberg was prepared to fully dedicate himself to running his company, as a CEO rather than a programmer, after major investment and a rising membership.

With Zuck in charge full-time, Facebook pursued its growth strategy. Universities from Australia and New Zealand, as well as high schools from Mexico, the UK, and Ireland, were added in December. That meant that 25,000 secondary schools and 2,500 colleges now have access to Facebook. Not until September 2006 did the platform become accessible to all users (well, anyone over 13 with a valid email address). Facebook has now fully internationalized. Additionally, the company began to observe the rate of membership increase.

Facebook’s Marketplace, which enables users to publish classified ads to sell goods and services, launched in May 2007. The Facebook Application Developer platform was also introduced at this time, allowing programmers to create their own Facebook-integrated applications and games. The platform was also considering how corporations may use the site, in addition to individual accounts. Over 100,000 businesses had signed up by the end of2007, and Facebook had just introduced Pages for Businesses to help with this. Even the smallest businesses will be able to advertise on the platform thanks to strategies already in place to expand on current ad revenue.

Then, in 2008, Facebook made a significant release. Facebook Chat became available in April2008, enabling people to relate with our friends and family more quickly. In essence, the idea is identical to ZuckNet. In the same year, Facebook debuted People You May Know, Facebook Wall, and Facebook Connect. Toward the end of the year 2009 the company’s users grew to 300 million in number. One of the popular Facebook games apparently showed up, as well. Farmville was introduced in June 2009 and quickly gained popularity despite being a copy of the game Farm Town. It had 10 million daily active users by August. There is a ton of virtual corn. Then, in December2009, Facebook finally reaches a significant milestone. It becomes the most well-liked social platform in the entire world with 350 million registered users and 132 million unique monthly users. Of course, the business had no intention of stopping there.

More alterations and adjustments were made the following year, including the addition of the like comment feature and upgrades to photo tagging. 500 million users became enrolled in July, and the company’s value increased significantly by year’s end. Facebook had a staggering $41 billion market value as of November 2010. Behind Google and Amazon, it rose to become the third-largest web corporation in the US. All of this was accomplished in less than five years, and development shows no signs of slowing. The following year, a further significant accomplishment was made. According to a survey by DoubleClick, Facebook reached 1 trillion page views in June 2011. The site was later discovered by Nielsen to be the second-most popular in the US for the entire year. Facebook Messenger was also made available as a stand-alone app in August. This happened after the business bought the group messaging service Beluga back in March. Facebook was now a well-known brand, a popular website on a global scale, and the pioneer of the social media revolution.

Facebook makes a significant acquisition in April: Instagram. We get an indication of the kind of resources the platform now has at its disposal by spending $1 billion. Just one month remained until the year’s major event.

By May, Zuckerberg was prepared to launch Facebook to the public. The corporation was worth $104 billion, or $38 per share (congrats Narendra and the Winklevoss Twins). After everything was said and done, the IPO generated a sizable $161 million, but problems were ahead. Technical problems and allegations of inappropriate underwriting behavior plagued the IPO, and Facebook’s stock value dropped by 25% as a result. By the end of the same month, everything.

The IPO was thereafter the subject of more than 40 lawsuits. The underwriters (Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs) may have behaved improperly, it was argued. There have been allegations that Facebook provided information to the underwriters that caused them to sell their shares, as well as reports that they slashed their revenue projections undercover during the IPO. In addition, there were issues with mishandled orders and trading malfunctions, and Facebook was accused of handling its IPO like a pump-and-dump operation. Facebook continued nonetheless. The platform logged its one billionth user in October.

Despite all the issues it brought, Facebook joined the Fortune 500 in 2013 at position462, a year after its first public offering. There was no longer any question that the corporation was a significant institution, particularly as its global presence grew. But now there were issues due to its popularity. A platform that is accessible to all seems like a great concept. Sadly, “everyone” includes a lot of horrible people who like nothing more than using the internet to be horrible people in front of as many people as they can. Facebook has a significant problem with abuse and hate speech, and it appeared ill-equipped to handle it. Facebook decided to take action after receiving complaints from a larger user base and campaigning from organizations like the Everyday Sexism Project. They acknowledged in a blog post that their attempts at moderation “failed to operate as successfully” as they’d hoped. They announced a number of modifications in an effort to address the problem.

These changes are as follows:

• A study and revision of the standards for assessing reports of hate speech
• Update the teams’ training on how to conduct these reviews.
• Increased responsibility for “cruel and insensitive” content producers, including a need that they identify their genuine identities
• Boost interaction with organizations already combating hate speech

Facebook celebrated its tenth anniversary in February 2014. Since the Harvard dorms, amazing progress had been made. What followed then? Strong, mobile figures came first. For a very long time, Facebook had advocated for a positive mobile experience. This paid off, as 1 billion people logged onto the site through mobile devices in the first three months of the year. The company also made a significant acquisition. Facebook announced in February 2014 that it will be purchasing WhatsApp for an astounding $19 billion. Despite the fact that Facebook already had a messaging service, this acquisition allowed it to access WhatsApp’s younger user base and its international users. There was another significant purchase the next month. This time, Oculus VR, a virtual reality firm. The Oculus VR headgear will “allow far more useful, enjoyable, and personal experiences,” according to a post by Mark Zuckerberg. A significant change occurred in April. Despite having a technically rival service, Facebook made the decision to separate Messenger into its own app. This refers to those who must download it separately in order to use it. There were 1.2 billion active Messenger users as of April 2017.

They introduced a new function in January 2015 that allows users to mark an article as a “fake news report.” If this occurred frequently enough, a note stating that the article had been reported as fraudulent would be included, and reports would also be taken into account by their algorithm. As we all know, this didn’t quite work, and the idea of false news as a whole was born. However, it wouldn’t be Facebook’s final attempt to solve the issue.

The publication of Facebook reactions was a more encouraging development. This meant that we could now comment on posts with more than just a simple “like,” such as “love,” “hate,” “ha ha,” “disgust,” “sad,” or “wow.” Although by no means a significant update, it demonstrated how Facebook was still considering ways to enhance some of its early features. Facebook then started rolling out Instant Articles in May. These allowed publishers to create articles that would be directly hosted by Facebook. While loading times will be drastically reduced, publishers may still make money from advertising.

The month of July also saw the announcement of an intriguing statistic: Facebook was used by 50% of internet users worldwide. This came about when the platform made figures from the three months ending in June public showing that 1.49 billion people had visited the site. In the same month, a Pew Research Center research outlined the significance of fake news on Facebook. It was discovered that 63% of Americans using the website (and, incidentally, Twitter) obtained their news from it. Facebook became an ideal platform for the spread of misinformation as a result of this. A few additional noteworthy updates in 2015 included 360 video, video calling in Messenger, and the opening of Facebook Live to verified public figures.

As the problem of fake news and hoaxes persisted into2016, Facebook said they now had 1.5 billion daily users, 3 million advertisers, and made $3.69 billion in profit in 2014. Unarguable numbers that are very powerful. In one of the first actions that will affect publishers’ and businesses’ organic traffic from the site, Facebook changed its algorithm in June. Your friends’ and family’ posts will take primacy in your feed, they declared. Great for holiday photos with the family, not so great for news outlets. However, Facebook then gave publishers a break in August by making another algorithm modification. The platform would now determine which stories were informative and then present them to users based on how well the content matched their interests. However, individuals who were creating high-quality journalism must have been disappointed that fake news was still gaining so much popularity. Facebook unveiled a new platform called Workplace in the midst of this. It served as an internal social network for businesses where employees could interact with each other and was primarily aimed at organizations.

When it was discovered that Facebook had been providing false metrics, a crisis ensued in September. The business was compelled to apologize for incorrectly estimating the number of video views and the duration of user viewing. It’s not the best time for a business that wants to stop the spread of false information on its own platform. By year’s end, the topic of false news had taken over the debate. After the US elections, “fake news” was a common phrase, and there were reports that a lot of it could be found on Facebook. People even went so far as to assert that misinformation shared on sites like it and Twitter polarized American politics by influencing the election in Trump’s favor.

In a response, Zuckerberg dismissed the notion that Facebook might have had an impact on the election. Whatever the facts, in the lead-up to the 2016 Presidential elections, false news received much more engagement than legitimate media sources. By December, Facebook had slightly altered its position. They announced plans to strengthen their community reporting capabilities, but they also said they would be collaborating with fact-checking organizations and altering their advertising guidelines to counter ads that spread false information. Facebook plainly worried that their brand had been harmed after a month of bad coverage, despite the fact that these were only experiments.

Facebook’s first significant announcement of 2017 related to journalism came with the new year’s strong financial results (unsurprisingly). Facebook created the Facebook Journalism Project in an effort to position itself as a corporation that wanted legitimate journalists to prosper. The platform would provide new storytelling forms, promote local news, provide journalism training, and instruct users on how to recognize false news as part of its mission to “create closer relationships between Facebook and the news sector.”

The platform also received a number of updates during the first quarter. There were new tools for preventing suicide as well as new options to assist others in getting food and shelter in times of need. But eventually talk turned back to fake news. Facebook revealed additional strategies to stop the spread of false information in April 2016. They stated that they would be employing three strategies: upsetting economic incentives (cutting off traffic to websites that post hoaxes and fake news), creating new products (ranking adjustments, user reporting, and collaboration with fact-checkers), and assisting individuals in making better decisions (the Facebook Journalism Project and creating a global consortium working to help people spot fake news). Facebook kept releasing intriguing upgrades, with Facebook Spaces being one of them. You could hang out with your friends “in person” using this VR app. This followed the release of more immersive 360-degree images and movies earlier this year that were compatible with VR devices. Then, once more, the platform’s user and financial statistics improved. Facebook produced over $3 billion in earnings in the first quarter of2017, a 76% increase from the same period last year. Then, in June, the firm made the astounding announcement that it had surpassed 2 billion members.

Facebook declared in September 2017 that it will give Congress, which was looking into allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections, ads connected to the Internet Research Agency. A Russian organization called Internet Research Agency was said to have launched 3,000 advertisements between 2015 and 2017. Facebook explained in a blog post from October the specifics of the advertisements and the data that went into them. They said that 10 million US people had seen the adverts, with 3 to 5 million seeing them prior to the election. They discussed everything from gun rights to racial issues.

Facebook underwent a significant change in January2018: a new algorithm. Your family and friends would suddenly take center stage in the News Feed. This increased the visibility of your own status updates and images, but it almost completely eliminated organic reach for businesses, nonprofits, and organizations. In other words, if you operated a page, your reach would decrease unless you started purchasing ads. This resembles the early days of Facebook in some ways, when posting pictures of your night out was all that people did there and there weren’t many adverts. It might end the careers of those who make money operating businesses on Facebook.

2018 was expected to be a successful year for Facebook with the new algorithm up and running and encouraging news regarding the company’s finances. With Facebook announcing tests of a downvote button to go along with reactions, there was still more experimenting to be done. However, privacy concerns continued. In Europe, it was determined that Facebook was infringing the law by following users across the internet and, more particularly, by not disclosing this activity sufficiently. Gizmodo, however, expressed alarm on Onavo. Facebook acquired Onavo in2013, a VPN application that enables users to access the internet anonymously (Gizmodo has an excellent explanation of them here). In February2018, Facebook included Onavo to their app as a menu item under the “Protect” heading. What was wrong with that, exactly? Onavo didn’t just function as a VPN, either. Additionally, it collected information about your phone and internet usage and sent it all directly to Facebook. For instance, that might monitor your app usage.

On March17,2018, a story went viral. According to The New York Times and The Guardian, an app called “This Is Your Digital Life” allowed users to scrape information on up to 87 million Facebook users. Users of this app shared not only their own personal information but also the information of their Facebook friends. As more and more people used the app, seemingly for a bit of fun, it soon collected a momentous amount of data.

In addition to the fact that this is questionable in and of itself, the information was later exploited for political purposes to aid several campaigns, including those of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. The organization Vote Leave, which ran a campaign in favor of Brexit, also made use of it. All of a sudden, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica were in the spotlight, and people were not happy. While people looked into ways to unfollow Facebook, there were calls for stricter laws regarding personal data.

If that weren’t terrible enough, the scandal caused Facebook to lose $70 billion in share value, and concerned and cagey advertisers. In order to address the concerns highlighted, Zuckerberg issued an apology for the incident, suspended Cambridge Analytica from the platform (the firm itself ceased operations on May1), as well as a number of other apps. As Facebook attempted to reassure users and advertisers, the crisis persisted, ultimately leading to Zuckerberg appearing before congress and a $663,000 punishment from the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office.

By the end of March, questions about Facebook’s potential use to influence future political events and privacy issues were still present (whether through mined data or fake news and content). When information on the advertisements purchased by the Internet Research Agency, a corporation supported by Russia, between 2015 and 2017 was made public by the US Congress, it didn’t help. This renewed interest in the platform’s political interference.

Facebook declared in May that it had disabled 1.3 billion phony accounts in the six months prior to March in an effort to allay concerns. Their newsroom also published numerous blog entries about security and privacy during this time, covering subjects including the data that Facebook collects and the user data that advertisers have. F8, Facebook’s developer conference, was also held in May. Facebook would be launching its own dating service, along with Zuckerberg praising the idea of using Facebook for good and advocating for more usage of fact checkers.

If Zuckerberg had believed that Facebook’s future was promising, June got off to a rough start. In a Pew Research Center survey, it was shown that youngsters were no longer as fascinated by the platform as they once were. In comparison to Pew’s 2015 study, 51% of those between the ages of 13 and 17 were Facebook users, according to Pew. Facebook lost out to other platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube in this dramatic decline.

Facebook announced Portal in the beginning of October 2018—a significant product announcement. With the intention of being used at home, Portal and the Portal+ were both video communication devices that allowed users to make video calls. Portal was designed to be put up in the home, allowing hands-free video conversations, and even followed callers as they moved around. It had Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant integrated in. Naturally, there were right away worries about privacy. People were concerned about bringing a device that could film them into their homes after the most recent hack. Rafa Camargo, the former CEO of Portal, stated that “privacy was planned from the ground up” in an interview with the BBC. Facebook also stated that they do not record or listen to calls, but they will not utilize end-to-end encryption, thus allowing police to listen in on calls.

Since then, sales of the gadgets have begun, with availability beginning in November 2018.

For allegedly participating in “violence and hate,” Facebook removed a number of “dangerous” commenters from its site in May2019. These individuals included Alex Jones, Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson, Paul Nehlen, David Duke, and Laura Loomer. In May2020, Facebook reached a preliminary settlement of $52 million ($54.4 million in 2021 dollars), which will cover the psychological suffering that American-based Facebook content moderators experienced while working for the company.

Imran Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, wrote to Mark Zuckerberg in October 2020 and begged him to prohibit Islamophobic information on Facebook since it incited extremism and violence. The letter was published on the government’s Twitter account. The business declared that it would prohibit Holocaust denial in October 2020.

Facebook declared in 2021 that it will try to stop spreading false information about climate change. As information sources, the company will consult the Universities of Cambridge, George Mason University, and Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. The company will include 16 countries in the reach of its climate information center. Other users will be referred to the United Nations Environment Programme website for information.