Facebook turns 20: From Mark Zuckerberg's dormitory to a tn company

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Facebook turns 20: From Mark Zuckerberg’s dormitory to a $1tn company

Published

3 months ago

February 4, 2024

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Facebook is 20 years old today.

On 4 February 2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched ‘thefacebook.com’ from his Harvard dormitory.

Two decades later, many users struggle to remember a time they weren’t scrolling through its news feed – or that of its social media sibling, Instagram.

While allowing us to find long-lost friends and family, and supporting small businesses, its 20-year history has been chequered with controversy – from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and allegations of election interference, to lacking protections against harmful content.

Here we look back at the last 20 years – and what could be in store for the trillion-dollar tech company.

2004

When computer science and psychology student Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com, it was only for students like him – and not open to the wider public.

It was designed so they could exchange posts, messages, and create a network of ‘friends’.

Its mainstay was the ‘wall’, where users could publish posts or write on others.

Facebook was hot on the heels of its early 2000s rival MySpace and was not monetised so refreshingly free of advertising.

But just a few days after it launched, three of Zuckerberg’s fellow Harvard students accused him of stealing their idea for a similar social network they had created called ConnectU. Twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss and Divya Narendra claimed Zuckerberg had helped them with ConnectU, but eventually agreed to settle their legal case in 2008 – in exchange for $65m (£51m), including Facebook shares, and their ConnectU business.

By the end of the year, Facebook already had a million users.

2005

You couldn’t upload photos on Facebook until 2005, when the ability to sub-categorise pictures into albums provided the first platform for the ‘photo dump’.

The inclusion of photos on Facebook also gave birth to the concept of the ‘profile picture’.

The year after the launch, Zuckerberg also decided to drop the ‘the’ and bought the domain name Facebook.com for $200,000 (£170,000) from a company called AboutFace Corporation.

2006

A year before the first iPhone was released, Facebook launched a bespoke mobile site for the first generation of smartphone users.

On 26 September 2006 Facebook expanded beyond university students for the first time – allowing anyone with an email address over the age of 18 to join.

With the expansion came the news feed, giving users a curated selection of their friends’ posts, and the wider world the concept of ‘scrolling’.

2006 was also the first year Facebook faced major controversy. Zuckerberg was forced to apologise after his Beacon feature, which sent data to third parties to create targeted ads, began showing users’ purchasing history on their profiles without their consent. Eventually people could opt to turn the feature off.

2007

Facebook’s fourth year brought with it several firsts – videos, ads, Marketplace and pages.

Introducing advertising created huge revenue streams and gave businesses a new way of selling themselves online.

Pages also meant companies and other organisations could create mini-professional profiles that were distinct from personal ones.

On a smaller consumer scale, individual users could advertise goods for sale.

2008

Facebook launched its own instant messenger ‘chat’ in March 2008, which became a separate app entirely known as ‘messenger’ in 2011.

With the iPhone came a dedicated Facebook app, separate from its mobile site.

A second major data breach saw the dates of birth of more than 80 million users published on the platform.

2009

This was the year of the ‘like’ button.

And to rival Twitter, which had launched in 2006, Facebook also introduced tagging for photos, posts, and comments.

2010

January 2010 saw Facebook’s first purpose-built data centre open in Oregon.

By the middle of the year the site had reached 500 million users, with ‘groups’ also added for the first time.

In October, The Social Network film was released. Starring Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg, it set out to tell the story of Facebook’s beginnings and the subsequent battle between its founder and the Winklevoss twins. Although it was a huge success in Hollywood, Zuckerberg criticised parts of it for being inaccurate.

2011

In 2011, Facebook began its long and complex relationship with law enforcement.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued it for multiple breaches of its privacy policy. These included users’ friends list being public even when they had made them private, and non-consensual sharing of their personal data with advertising companies.

By 2023, the FTC was on its third case against Facebook.

2011 was also the year the much-loved Facebook wall was replaced with a timeline.

2012

In April 2012, Facebook bought Instagram for $1bn (£0.8bn) and in May it was floated on the stock market for the first time.

Zuckerberg said he bought the photo-sharing app because it was a “threat” to Facebook’s future and the IPO was one of the biggest and most anticipated in history, with an estimated share value of $104bn (£82.2bn).

Oculus, a Facebook-owned brand, also produced its first virtual reality headset.

Later that year the platform reached a new milestone of one billion users – a seventh of the world’s population.

2013

In June 2013 a bug saw the email addresses and phone numbers of six million Facebook users accessible online.

It was thought to have been an issue since the year before but was only spotted in 2013.

In terms of features, this year saw users able to edit their posts retrospectively and share stickers as well as emojis.

2014

Two years after the acquisition of Instagram, Facebook bought WhatsApp for 19 times the amount. WhatsApp was created in 2009 for iPhone by a former Yahoo employee.

Today more than half of the world’s internet users have WhatsApp.

2015

At the very end of 2015 the Cambridge Analytica scandal was first reported by The Guardian and The New York Times.

Over the next few years it emerged that the UK-based political consultancy firm had harvested millions of Facebook users’ data for various clients without their consent.

The scandal implicated US politicians, and the Vote Leave campaign, among others. Eventually the UK Information Commissioner ruled the firm was not involved in the Brexit referendum beyond “some initial enquiries… in the early stages” by UKIP.

It was hugely damaging for Facebook’s reputation and its finances.

2016

As self-shooting live broadcasts became more and more of a feature on the internet, Facebook Live was launched.

Three years later it was used by terrorist Brenton Tarrant as he carried out the Christchurch Mosque shootings in New Zealand, which killed 51 people and left 40 injured.

AI now exists to help Facebook identify and block people from filming themselves carrying out atrocities.

2017

A year after stories became a feature on Instagram, Zuckerberg and his developers introduced them on Facebook.

In a less popular move, Facebook 360 was launched to enable users to upload panoramic photos to their profiles.

2018

The Cambridge Analytica scandal came to a head in 2018, with a raid of their London offices and the company eventually disbanding.

It led to Zuckerberg being compelled to appear before US Congress to answer questions for the first time.

Facebook also suffered the fallout of another data breach that year in which hackers accessed logins of 50 million users.

And former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg joined the company as vice president of global affairs. He has since been promoted to president.

2019

Three separate data breaches continued to chip away at Facebook’s image in 2019.

The first saw 540 million users’ data made public, the second happened when Facebook “unintentionally” released emails of more than 1.5 million people, and the third saw the names, phone numbers and usernames of 267 million people made public.

In response to privacy concerns, Meta says it’s since invested $5.5bn (£4.3bn) to tackle the issue, with a team of 3,000 people worldwide.

“As expectations around privacy evolve, it’s critical for companies to continue investing in guardrails and processes to meet people’s privacy needs and expectations,” it said in a recent statement.

2020

A second FTC case against Facebook resulted in a court order banning it from monetising data acquired from profiles of users under 18 and limiting its use of AI.

This year, as part of its response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook agreed to “fundamentally shift our approach to protecting people’s privacy” and paid a $5bn (£3.9bn) fine.

2021

As COVID continued to separate people all over the world from their loved ones, Zuckerberg announced Facebook Inc would become Meta.

Not only was Meta a parent company for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other assets, it also laid the groundwork for the ‘Metaverse’.

In its launch announcement, Zuckerberg described it as “letting you share immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together – and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world” and the “next evolution in a long line of social technologies”.

In December 2021 a joint $150m (£118m) lawsuit sued Facebook over allegations it failed to address misinformation that promoted the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

In response, Meta created a Myanmar-specific policy to remove praise, support, and advocacy of violence by Myanmar security forces and protesters on all its platforms. It has also banned the Myanmar military itself, including any pages, groups, and accounts representing military-controlled businesses.

Its latest statement added: “Our team continues to monitor the situation on the ground in Myanmar and we will continue to take any action necessary to keep our community safe.”

2022

Meta’s safeguarding measures against harmful content came under unprecedented scrutiny in 2022 when a UK coroner ruled that “negative online content” had played a role in someone’s suicide for the first time.

The case was that of Molly Russell, a 14-year-old schoolgirl from London, who was found dead in her bedroom in 2017.

Her father Ian campaigned against under-regulated tech companies after evidence emerged she had viewed content that promoted self-harm and suicide on platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest.

The firm’s head of health and wellbeing, Elizabeth Lagone, attended the hearing in person and said many posts viewed by Molly would have violated Instagram’s policies, for which she apologised.

2023

By 2023 the Metaverse had begun to cost its parent company dearly.

By the end of the year, Meta Reality Labs had haemorrhaged $46.5bn (£36bn). As such, 2023 quickly became Zuckerberg’s self-proclaimed “year of efficiency” with 21,000 planned job cuts.

Meanwhile, Meta honed in on its rival X, formerly Twitter, which had not long been bought outright by Elon Musk. To do so it launched its own subscription service – Meta verified – and a separate X-style app for Instagram called Threads.

By the end of the year, Meta was also facing its third privacy case from the FTC in the US.

So what’s next?

In 2024 and beyond, Facebook’s challenges remain largely the same as recent years – and revolve mainly around misinformation and regulation.

Fears over profitability when billions were lost following the launch of the Metaverse in 2021 appear to have been reversed, with share prices reaching an all-time high.

Social media consultant and industry analyst Matt Navara says this is largely to do with job cuts that have enabled Zuckerberg’s AI work on the Metaverse to be a cash cow for the ad revenue business.

Similarly, the threat once posed by TikTok has mostly subsided with the success of Instagram Reels and TikTok’s growth plateauing. Meta has also benefited from Elon Musk’s takeover and rebranding of X, which has facilitated the launch of a rival app Threads.

Mr Navarra comments that Meta has often proved “like Teflon” in that “nothing very bad seems to stick for long”.

But as 2024 began for Zuckerberg answering awkward questions around online harms in the US Senate, it appears legislation that could curb how Meta’s platform operate is “closer than ever”.

“We’re at the point where it’s hard for US lawmakers to do nothing, with bipartisan support for new regulation coming through.”

But he says questions remain on how impactful legislation would be – as has been in the case in the UK and Europe.

Meta has already said it will stop under-18s from being able to view harmful content about self-harm and eating disorders.

And in a year when two billion people are going to the polls in elections, misinformation will be Meta’s ultimate test.

“All platforms will face criticism,” Mr Navarra says. “There will be headlines around the abuse of AI and what Meta’s role has been. It probably has the most advanced automated systems in place to tackle it, but undoubtedly things will slip through the cracks and I suspect it’ll never be enough.”

Beyond this year, Mr Navarra predicts that Zuckerberg’s vision of the Metaverse is still “someway out”, and possibly into the next decade, with virtual reality headsets unlikely to be commercially viable until at least 2027.

2024

So far in 2024, Meta has promised to hide content that promotes self-harm and eating disorders on Facebook and Instagram.

It says it plans to use the 40,000 staff it has working on safety and security worldwide and the $20bn invested since 2016 to make further progress on those issues.

And Zuckerberg has appeared before the US Senate, apologising to families whose children have fallen victim to online sexual exploitation on his platforms.

In response to this year’s elections, Meta has promised to block new political ads during the final week of the US election campaign and will require advertisers to disclose when they use AI in social or political posts.

Shares skyrocketed when it was announced shareholders would receive dividends from Meta for the first time at the start of February.

World

Om Fahad: Iraqi social media influencer shot dead by gunman on motorbike who posed as food delivery rider – report

Published

15 hours ago

April 27, 2024

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Om Fahad: Iraqi social media influencer shot dead by gunman on motorbike who posed as food delivery rider - report

A well-known Iraqi social media influencer has reportedly been shot dead in her car by a gunman on a motorbike.

Om Fahad, whose real name is Ghufran Sawadi, was killed outside her home in Baghdad’s Zayouna district on Friday, according to the AFP news agency, citing security officials.

It appears the unidentified attacker pretended to be delivering food to the victim, one security source said.

Om Fahad, who has nearly half a million TikTok followers, became famous for posting light-hearted videos where she dances to Iraqi music.

Six days ago, she shared footage of herself driving in a car and also posing in front of a mirror. They have each been watched hundreds of thousands of times.

The influencer was sentenced to six months in prison in February last year for sharing videos that a court ruled contained “indecent speech that undermines modesty and public morality”.

A campaign was launched in 2023 by the Iraqi government to clamp down on social media content which broke the country’s “morals and traditions”.

The interior ministry set up a committee to look for “offensive” clips on platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, with several influencers being arrested.

“This type of content is no less dangerous than organised crime,” the ministry declared in a promotional video which asked the public to help by reporting such content.

“It is one of the causes of the destruction of the Iraqi family and society.”

Speaking last year, interior ministry spokesman Saad Maan argued the morality campaign has “nothing to do with freedom of expression”.

In 2018, gunmen in Baghdad shot dead Tara Fares, who was a model and influencer.

After years of war and sectarian conflict following the 2003 US invasion that overthrew dictator Saddam Hussein, Iraq has returned to some semblance of normality despite sporadic violence, political instability and corruption.

But civil liberties, particularly among women and sexual minorities, are still constrained in a conservative and male-dominated society.

World

Anti-immigrant camp in Dublin ‘not about racism’, residents say

Published

21 hours ago

April 27, 2024

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Anti-immigrant camp in Dublin 'not about racism', residents say

In the nation of ‘Cade Mile Failte’ (a hundred thousand welcomes), the residents of Coolock want to shut the door.

They’ve set up an anti-immigrant camp in the north Dublin suburb, outside a disused factory earmarked to house asylum seekers.

With green, white and orange, they’re staking claim to this ground, their protest tents bedecked with dozens of Irish flags.

Car horns blast every four or five seconds, in response to a large poster reading: “Beep if you support Coolock.”

Their other roadside banners state: “Community concern over 1,000 male migrants being housed in this building” and “Irish lives matter”.

The camp is occupied 24 hours a day, with young men guarding it overnight and residents of all ages during the day.

Two elderly women, two younger women and half a dozen men of various ages were on site when we arrived.

Analysis: Clashes with police as anti-migration protests erupt in Ireland

Sean Crowe, who describes himself as “a concerned parent”, said: “Coolock’s message is we don’t want them here, we just don’t want them, end of story.

“We have our own gangs and trouble going on that we can’t sort out. The place is bad enough as it is.”

“It’s just going to put more of a strain,” the father-of-one added.

Asked how he would reply to those who describe protesters as “racist”, he replied: “It’s not about racism.

“It’s about the strain it’s going to put on the community and local amenities around the place.

“That’s all it’s about, concerned parents.”

The camp at Coolock is just one of several that have sprung up across the Republic in the past year.

In several places, like Newtownkennedy in County Wicklow, the tension has reached breaking point, with public order police officers deployed.

“We fear they’re going to do the same thing here,” said one protestor at Coolock, who wished to remain anonymous.

“If the Gardai [Irish police] attempt to shut down our peaceful protest, all hell will break loose here,” she added.

With the sun shining and the smell of meat cooking on their barbecue, it had a community feel about it.

But they’re fiercely critical of their current government and you can sense that the tension isn’t far beneath the surface.

“Eighty percent of them are crossing the border from Northern Ireland and they knew that would happen,” Sean told me.

“It’s time to close the border” are not words you expect to hear, when Ireland fought hard to keep it open.

World

Family protests outside suspected serial killer’s lair as they wait for news of teenager who went missing 12 years ago

Published

21 hours ago

April 27, 2024

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Family protests outside suspected serial killer's lair as they wait for news of teenager who went missing 12 years ago

The family of a missing high school student who may have been the first victim of a suspected serial killer in Mexico City have protested at the site where bones were found last week.

The bones were discovered with the belongings of at least six women, police said, and Amairany Roblero’s relatives have been told that evidence was found relating to her 2012 disappearance.

Ms Roblero was 18 when she vanished and, as is often the case in Mexico, her family was left to investigate her disappearance with little help from prosecutors.

Family friend Alejandra Jimenez said: “The prosecutors had the case file but they didn’t ever give any results to her parents.”

Instead, her parents printed flyers and gave them out near her school – the last place she was seen – but they had “nothing, nowhere to start, nor any directions to the end”, Ms Jimenez added.

A suspect, identified only by his first name, Miguel, was detained by neighbours and police last week after he is alleged to have killed a seventh young woman.

He is accused of waiting for a woman to leave her apartment and then rushing inside to sexually abuse and strangle her 17-year-old daughter.

The woman returned to the apartment to see the suspect leaving and she was slashed across her neck before he ran off.

She survived but her daughter died.

Investigators searched a room rented by the suspect and found bones, mobile phones and ID cards belonging to several women in the same block, thought to be mementos.

Miguel is awaiting trial on charges of murder and attempted murder relating to the most recent victims.

City prosecutor Ulises Lara insisted the suspect was difficult to catch because “he showed no signs of violent or aggressive behaviour in his daily life”.

Ms Roblero’s family and friends were not accepting this, however.

“They (authorities) have all the means to look for missing people,” Ms Jimenez said. “Instead of focusing on their political campaigns, they should help all the women who are looking for their children.”

Juan Carlos Gutierrez, a lawyer representing the family of another victim, was also frustrated, asking why no investigation had never been launched in that case, despite missing person reports being filed in 2015.

Ms Jimenez said Ms Roblero’s family had not been told which of the items or remains in the apartment had been linked to her, adding: “This is wearing her parents down physically, mentally.”

Some 2,580 women were murdered in Mexico in 2023, according to the country’s National Public Security System but poorly funded and badly trained prosecutors have failed to stop serial killers over the years.

In 2021 a serial killer in Mexico City killed 19 people but their bodies were only found, buried at his house, after the wife of a police commander became one of the victims.

In 2018 another serial killer in Mexico City murdered at least 10 women and was only stopped after he was seen pushing a dismembered body down the street in a pram.