20 years of Facebook… How did a website created by a student for his university develop into a trillion-dollar company?
On February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched the website “thefacebook.com” from his residence at Harvard University, as an idea for communication among some university students. It later turned into the most famous and most widely used social networking application in the world.
While the site has a number of advantages, the most important of which is that it helps us connect with friends and family members whom we have not seen for a long time, and supports small businesses, its twenty-year history has been full of controversy, starting with the “Cambridge Analytica” scandal and allegations of election interference. To lack of protection against malicious content.
A report published by the British Sky News network conveyed the stages of Facebook’s development, from a simple website established in a university dormitory, to a company worth a trillion dollars.
2004
When Zuckerberg, a student of computer science and psychology, launched Facebook, it was intended for his university students only, and was not open to the wider public.
The site was designed primarily so that students could exchange posts and messages.
The launch of Facebook came directly after the founding of MySpace, its competitor, in the early 2000s. Zuckerberg’s site was not generating any profits and was completely devoid of ads.
A few days after its launch, Zuckerberg faced accusations from three of his colleagues at Harvard University of stealing their idea for a similar social network they created, called “ConnectU.” The twins, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, claimed that Zuckerberg helped them with the “ConnectU” project, and stole the idea from them after that; But they eventually agreed to settle their legal case in 2008, for $65 million.
2005
People couldn’t upload photos to Facebook until 2005; The site then gave its users the ability to place photos in sub-albums.
Inserting photos on Facebook also led to the emergence of the concept of the “personal photo.”
2006
A year before the launch of the first iPhone, Facebook launched a mobile version of it for the first generation of smartphone users.
On September 26, 2006, Facebook expanded to include anyone who claims to be over 13 years old, regardless of whether they have an affiliation with a university or not.
With the expansion, the site launched the “News Feed” feature, which introduced the concept of “browsing” for news and a selection of publications.
2006 was also the first year in which Facebook faced major controversy. Zuckerberg was forced to apologize to users after the Beacon feature began sending their data to third parties to create targeted ads, and also displayed their purchase history in their profiles without their consent.
2007
Facebook’s fourth year brought with it many firsts; The site allowed the publication of video clips and pages, and advertisements on it spread significantly.
The spread of advertising on Facebook has created huge revenue streams and given companies a new way to market themselves online.
The pages also allowed companies and other institutions to spread professionally as well.
2008
Facebook launched its instant messaging application in March 2008, which in 2011 became a separate application known as Messenger.
This year witnessed a data breach in which the birth dates of more than 80 million users were published on the platform.
Facebook application logo (Reuters)
2009
This year, Facebook added the “Like” button.
To compete with Twitter, which was launched in 2006, Facebook also introduced the feature of tagging people in photos, posts, and comments.
2010
January 2010 saw the opening of Facebook’s first private data center in Oregon.
By mid-year, the number of site users had reached 500 million, with the idea of creating “groups” also added for the first time.
2011
In 2011, Facebook began its long and complex relationship with law enforcement.
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit against him, due to multiple violations of his privacy policy. These violations included the site converting “private” friend lists to “public” without users’ permission, and sharing their personal data with advertising companies without their consent.
By 2023, the FTC had its third case against Facebook.
2012
In April 2012, Facebook bought the Instagram app for $1 billion, and in May it was listed 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.
Oculus, a brand owned by Facebook, also produced the first virtual reality headset this year.
Later that year, the platform reached a new milestone, reaching one billion users, one-seventh of the world’s population.
Instagram application logo (AP)
2013
In June 2013, a Facebook bug caused the email addresses and phone numbers of six million Facebook users to be exposed online.
In terms of features, this year it allowed users to edit their previous posts, share stickers as well as emojis.
2014
Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014 for 19 times the amount it paid for Instagram.
Today, more than half of the world’s Internet users use the WhatsApp application.
2015
At the end of 2015, the “Cambridge Analytica” scandal was revealed for the first time by the “Guardian” and “New York Times” newspapers. It was found that the personal data of about 50 million Americans and at least one million Britons had been harvested from “Facebook” and leaked in a malicious way. Not a good fit for Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm based in the United Kingdom.
This scandal damaged Facebook’s reputation and finances.
2016
Facebook launched the live broadcast feature “facebook live”.
Three years later, terrorist Brenton Tarrant used this feature during his shooting attack on the Christchurch Mosque in New Zealand, which killed 51 people and injured 40 others. The feature received widespread criticism.
2017
Facebook launched the Stories feature in 2017, a year after it was launched on Instagram.
The site also launched the “Facebook 360” feature to enable users to upload panoramic photos to their personal files.
2018
The Cambridge Analytica scandal came to a head in 2018, with the company’s London offices raided and the company eventually dissolved.
This led to Zuckerberg being forced to undergo a hearing in this regard, before a joint committee of members of the US Congress.
Facebook also suffered the repercussions of another data breach that year. The hackers were able to access the logins of 50 million users.
2019
That year, the site experienced 3 separate data breaches, which greatly affected its image.
The first breach saw the data of 540 million users published, while the second involved Facebook unintentionally publishing emails for more than 1.5 million people, and the third breach involved publishing the names and phone numbers of 267 million people.
In response to privacy concerns, Meta says it has since invested $5.5 billion to address this issue.
2020
A second US Federal Trade Commission case against Facebook led to a court order prohibiting it from monetizing data obtained from the profiles of users under the age of 18, and limiting its use of artificial intelligence.
This year, as part of its response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook agreed to “fundamentally change our approach to protecting people’s privacy” and paid a $5 billion fine.
2021
In 2021, Facebook announced that it would change its name to “Meta,” which is a Greek word that means “beyond,” and also refers to “Metaverse,” the parallel world in which Zuckerberg sees the future of the Internet.
In December 2021, Facebook faced a lawsuit over its failure to address misinformation that promoted the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
In response, Meta created a Myanmar policy to remove praise, support and calls for violence by Myanmar security forces and protesters on all its platforms. It also banned the Myanmar military itself, and any pages, groups or accounts representing military-controlled companies.
Meta company logo (Reuters)
2022
Meta’s protections against harmful content came under unprecedented scrutiny in 2022, when a UK coroner ruled that “negative online content” played a role in a person’s suicide for the first time.
This case involved a girl named Molly Russell, a 14-year-old British schoolgirl, who was found dead in her bedroom in 2017.
The girl’s father launched a campaign against unregulated technology companies, after evidence emerged that his daughter had watched content promoting self-harm and suicide on platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest.
Meta’s head of health and well-being, Elizabeth Laughon, apologized in court for what happened to Molly, acknowledging that many of the posts she saw were indeed in violation of Instagram’s policies.
2023
Meta’s Reality Labs sector, which deals with virtual reality technologies, saw a loss of $46.5 billion in 2023.
Zuckerberg also eliminated 21,000 planned jobs.
Last year, Meta launched the Threads application to compete with Twitter, and by the end of the year, Meta was also facing the third privacy case filed by the Federal Trade Commission in the United States.
2024
Last week, Zuckerberg apologized to the victims of social media platforms and their families, during a session before the US Congress, which included the heads of “Meta”, “X”, “Tik Tok”, “Discord” and “Snapchat”, and revolved around the dangers of social networks to children and teenagers.
The head of Meta said while standing before the victims of digital platform violations and their families in one of the halls of Congress: “I am sorry for everything you have gone through,” adding that “no one should experience the things that your families have suffered.”
Zuckerberg spoke about many measures taken by his group to protect the young group, recalling that “Meta” has invested more than $20 billion in the issue of safety since 2016, and has employed 40,000 people in the content management and safety departments of the platforms.
