2024-02-10 08:00:00
Facebook turned 20 years old. The social network was originally designed for internal communication at Harvard University.
“The Facebook” was created exactly on February 4, 2004 by a group of students among whom was none other than Mark Zuckerberg. In 2006 it was opened as a public social network and two years later it already had 100 million people.
“The novelty was to offer a environment of ‘community’ ties with news from the personal sphere, first among Harvard university students and, in the following years, open to everyone,” Conicet researcher and university professor Martín Becerra told Télam.
For the specialist both “the design, the ability to label other users and the economic injection of the company” were factors that drove the “overwhelming development” of the social network.
In a short time Facebook managed to position itself as “the first major generalist social network”, explained the doctor in Social Communication Francisco Albarellos to the same news agency.
“The novelty that Facebook brought was the possibility of that each user becomes a user-producer authorcapable of generating content, publishing it and creating an audience,” added the professor from the Austral University.
In that sense, being the first platform to achieve massiveness, “naturally other competitors were going to succeed it but it was the first to have that honeymoon that monopolized all the attention and hegemony,” indicated the specialist about subsequently created experiences such as Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok.
At the moment, Facebook has more than 2,000 million users daily assets, according to official data provided from Meta.
As the platform evolved, new options were included such as tags in photos and publications, reactions, memories, among other adaptations. Many of them suffered harsh rejections from users.
Becerra stressed that on the platform there were “important modifications both in the design of the application as well as its adaptation to the mobile format” especially from the second decade of this century. In this sense, he highlighted that the most significant change “is the personalized algorithmic programming of the ‘feed’. At first I had a “chronological organization” of what all the contacts published.
The Facebook scandals
Obviously the social network was protagonist of several controversies. There were scandals around the reporting of content and controversies over the confidentiality and use of data of the users.
Without going any further, the platform was involved in scandals such as Cambridge Analytica in 2018, whose trial determined the violation of the privacy rights of millions of American users to favor Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.
On the other hand, recently, Mark Zuckerberg should have apologized too to relatives of victims of harassment in underage networks in the US Senate.
Currently, in social networks in general and on Facebook in particular, there is a special concern about the private information of minors of age and use.
The specialists cited above agreed on this point, and pointed out that the algorithmic programming model of social networks “is based on the radicalization of content, in the scandalbecause the morbidity it causes in users “attracts their attention more than less extreme content.”
In that sense, as is the case with other platforms, the profusion of fake news, disinformation operations and hate speech. Without a doubt this puts everyone’s life and integrity at risk.
Among the main changes that have taken place in recent years, Albarellos referred to a greater presence of adult audiencesto the detriment of young people and adolescents, who migrate to other platforms.
Facebook is “today the sociodigital network most used by the population over 40 years old“, indicated Becerra, and concluded that despite its massiveness, there is evidence of “a decline in the daily (and accumulated monthly) time that users spend on the platform.”
With the enormous success of Facebook, Zuckerberg built an unprecedented social network and technological empire.
The BBC recalled that companies such as WhatsApp and Instagram were purchased and enhanced under the Facebook “umbrella”which changed its name to Meta in 2022.
Two questions arise:What will happen to Facebook in the next years? We still don’t know, what will happen to our data? Time left us some lessons.
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