Key Post: EOTO- Facebook

 In today's Media Law and Literacy key post, we are going to discuss the creation, history and impact of the social media company, Facebook. 

The History

The social media site Facebook (Originally called thefacebook.com) was created in 2004 by a group of Harvard University students who took their idea created in a dorm room to the largest and most popular social media website/application in the world. 

Photo Credit (en.wikipedia.org)

The original founders include Mark Zuckerburg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Facebook was once a webpage that was shut down by Harvard University administrators in 2003. At the same time thefacebook.com was a place where 250,000 students at 34 different universities came together and built an online community. At the end of the 2004 calendar year, Facebook had a community of users that totaled over 1 million.  A piece of facebook from the beginning of the company, is that all of the users of the website or application have to be transparent about their identity and users are not allowed to to have false profiles or false identities. A famous time where this rule was broken was the Manti Te'o fake girlfriend controversy which caused Te'o's draft selection to slip in the NFL draft.  Facebook's policy is that "transparency is necessary for forming personal relationships, sharing ideas and information and building up society as a whole. " (Britannica, 2022) The company's policy also promotes "peer-to-peer connectivity among Facebook users make it easier for businesses to connect their products with consumers. In 2006, Facebook opened its membership beyond students to anyone over the age of 13. Two years later, Facebook surpassed MySpace as the most visited social media application/website. Finally, after 8 years as a privately owned business, Zuckerburg and Facebook went public.  Initially raising $16 billion dollars but giving it a market value of $102.4 billion. Later, in 2021, Facebook announced it was changing its name to Meta Platforms in an attempt to sell users and consumers on virtual reality environments, also known as the Metaverse.

The Impact

Facebook is a company in which that is free to access and use. It has brought users together by "creating profiles, uploading photos, joining a preexisting group or starting a new group. " (Britannica, 2022) In addition to the previous functions, users can also can post messages on the Status board as well as the News feed which explains to users of their friends profile updates and posts. Another piece of this is the private messaging functions and the liking of posts which also appears, more commonly on almost every social media webpage/app in 2022. 

Photo Credit(en.wikipedia.org)

Another one of the major impacts that Facebook has had is the political movements that have taken place within its platform. An example is the 2008 US presidential election. Within the run up to that election, there were more than a thousand facebook groups to support of either democratic candidate, who happened to be Barrack Obama against the late and great John McCain. All the way until today, Facebook has also been working with third party companies to generate business while using Facebook as an advertising area. For a 2004 founded company, by 2009, Facebook's contracted third parties had earned an estimated $500 million in revenue. All in all, Facebook has been the biggest success in the technology and communications world by adding multiple dimensions for users to communicate, share, find new opportunities, and consume both information and products.