Facebook at 20: how the social media giant lost its youthful charm
Aoife Barry
6 January 2023
The platform was once a touchstone and it still boasts three billion
active users, but after years of scandal it is unlikely to regain its
old relevance
Cast your mind back to 2004: Nasa lands the Spirit rover on Mars; the
last episode of Friends airs; Saddam Hussein goes on trial for war
crimes; George W Bush is re-elected US president. Over at Harvard
University, computer science student Mark Zuckerberg is in his dorm
room, coding. Lately, he’s been nurturing a reputation as a minor enfant
terrible on campus after creating the shortlived site FaceMash, which
allowed students to rate each other’s hotness.
By February 2004, he is on to a more serious proposition: an online
directory of Harvard students called The Facebook. Zuckerberg and the
team working on the site — Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris
Hughes — believe that the invention has potential. But they have no idea
what sort of impact it will have on them — and the whole world.
Facebook was one of countless tech start-ups that emerged in the early
2000s, taking advantage of the potential for user-generated online
content and advances in digital technology. Many failed, but Facebook
didn’t just survive — it helped to create social media as we know it.
Its trajectory shows just how much has changed on the internet since its
inception 20 years ago next month. In its early days, its aim was
simple: to provide people with a democratic platform on which to gather
and share their lives.
Figures such as tech investor Peter Thiel, the ‘conservative
libertarian’ and co-founder of Paypal, were quick to spot the site’s
potential. A $500,000 investment from Thiel helped bring Facebook — the
‘the’ was quickly dropped — out of the dorm room and into a small office
in California.
Membership spread fast once it breached Harvard, sweeping across
America, then the globe. By 2008, it had 100 million members, and was
about to open its international HQ in Dublin. By 2012 it had 1 billion
members and had moved into the former Sun Microsystems campus in Silicon
Valley.
Zuckerberg was the face of the company. Early on, his nerdy, youthful
look and intense yet wide-eyed approach made him a hit with the media.
He might have shuffled around the office in socks and sliders, but his
casual appearance masked what a savvy businessman he was.
Facebook would be nothing without Zuckerberg, but it would also be
nothing without its members. It was created, we believed, for us. It
allowed us to be nosy about other people’s lives, and deep into Web 2.0
we were collectively understanding the internet’s ability to make the
world feel like a small room in which you could bump into a close pal,
or a global warehouse where you might strike up a relationship with a
curious stranger.
Sheryl Sandberg saw the huge advertising potential of Facebook when she
joined in 2008.
One of Facebook’s best decisions for its future was tapping into user
data. While handing over their names and dates of birth and detailing
their interests, images, likes and dislikes to help make friends,
members were also giving the rapidly growing Facebook information that
would help it make money. But the company didn’t turn a profit until
former Google executive Sheryl Sandberg came on board as chief operating
officer in 2008. She immediately saw the advertising potential in the
wealth of data that Facebook’s users were sharing.
Another major move came in 2006, when the News Feed was introduced.
Rather than having to visit profiles, members could log in to see
algorithmically chosen information pulled from their friends’ activities
on Facebook, presented in one long stream. The reaction was intense,
with some members calling it creepy and intrusive — Zuckerberg had to
say publicly that the company agreed “stalking isn’t cool”. But the News
Feed stayed, and users got used to it. The ‘infinite scroll’ that was
part of the feed became a common feature of future social media sites.
Once Facebook was settled into its role as social media’s hottest
property, Zuckerberg couldn’t get lazy. He understood that the tech
world was moving swiftly (remember MySpace and Bebo?), and that other
bright sparks in dorm rooms and offices would be coming up with ideas he
hadn’t. So when the photo-sharing app Instagram appeared, he recognised
it as a threat. He snapped up the company in 2012 for $1bn. Two years
later, with fears that messaging app WhatsApp was a serious rival to
Facebook Messenger, Facebook bought it for more than $19bn.
If we can point to a year where things changed for Facebook, we have to
flip the calendar to 2015. Specifically, June 16, 2015, when Donald
Trump announced he was running for US president. By then, politicians
understood Facebook’s potential, and how it could be harnessed to allow
people such as Barack Obama to run successful digital campaigns. Why
couldn’t Trump do the same?
In the documentary Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse (out on Sky
Documentaries and Now from January 11), Trump’s 2016 campaign’s digital
media director, Brad Parscale, explains that he told his boss Facebook
would be crucial to the campaign. By spending money on Facebook ads,
Trump could be guaranteed to reach his ideal audience, micro-targeting
them as necessary. Tens of millions were spent on tens of thousands of
ads, but the content of some of Trump’s posts caused massive headaches
for the platform — such as a video posted by his campaign in 2015 of him
calling for Muslims to be banned from entering the US.
Never before had Facebook faced the spectre of a US presidential
candidate posting content like this. Remove it, and it could turn away
already wary Republican members and be accused of censorship. The post
stayed. Facebook would face many hard decisions in the future about who
and what to allow on its platform.
After the Capitol attacks, Facebook chose to suspend Trump’s account.
For some, the decision was five years too late
In their book An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Dominion,
journalists Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang outline how the 2016
presidential election saw Facebook being used by fake news sites to
“[pump] out increasingly outlandish stories” about Trump and his rival,
Hillary Clinton. In the aftermath, Zuckerberg was called to account for
how his site was used, and the company still had to prepare for round
two with the 2020 US election. The News Feed was tweaked in 2018 to show
more ‘friends and family’ and ‘credible’ news content to cut down how
much misinformation was shown to members.
Soon Facebook faced darker days: it was pinpointed as being used to
spread false news about the Rohingya community in Myanmar; the media
reported on how its private group pages were being used by white
supremacists; and in 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal highlighted
issues around the safety of its user data. Zuckerberg was later called
before the US Congress to be questioned about the company’s approach to
data privacy.
Biden’s presidential win in 2020 was followed by Trump’s claims that the
election was ‘stolen’. Then came the January 6 attack on the Capitol in
2021, and waves of ‘stop the steal’ posts from Trump supporters across
social media. It was a pivotal moment for the firefighting Facebook.
What should it do about Trump’s posts in the run-up to the violence? It
had already been criticised for leaving up Trump’s post after the
killing of George Floyd, which read “when the looting starts, the
shooting starts”. This time, it chose to suspend his account. For some,
the decision was five years too late. Since Trump came to power,
misinformation and fake news had found a solid home across social media,
and showed that all the platforms had major difficulties moderating
high-profile figures.
But the 2016 election had merely greased the wheels for the train marked
‘misinformation’, which slammed into social media when the coronavirus
hit in early 2020. Everything that made Facebook great was on show
during the pandemic: it was a virtual place to meet, share worries and
post sourdough starter updates. But as the world shut down, some members
capitalised on information gaps about Covid-19, lockdowns and vaccines
to peddle misinformation on Facebook and other sites, across personal
pages, private groups and public groups. Virtual anger turned into
real-life protests. Facebook-owned WhatsApp was used to share spurious
encrypted messages, and stoke fear.
Donald Trump, who used the Facebook site to great effect for his 2016 US
presidential campaign. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
All social media platforms had to find ways to deal with this new wave
of misinformation, but what the Trump era had taught users was that it
takes a lot to be suspended from Facebook.
As the company grappled with how to tackle misinformation in the wake of
the pandemic, politicians and tech leaders tussled over tech regulation,
and the European Union began making stronger moves to fight online
disinformation with the Digital Services Act. Meanwhile, former content
moderators contracted to work for Facebook were bringing cases to the
Irish High Court alleging that dealing with the site’s underbelly led to
post-traumatic stress disorder.
It was a former Facebook employee who caused a controversy big enough
that it appeared to nudge along a company rebrand. Frances Haugen spent
nearly two years on the civic misinformation team at the company, but
turned whistleblower in 2021 after coming to the conclusion that
Facebook “chooses profit over safety”. She brought with her copies of
internal documents to prove her case. Her claims about how Facebook
dealt with misinformation, and how Instagram affected teenagers, went
global.
So you can imagine that the chats in Facebook HQ were intense during the
summer of 2021. In October, came the company’s biggest announcement in
years: it was rebranding as Meta. Zuckerberg underlined how the change
tied in with the company’s focus on developing its virtual reality
metaverse, but critics thought it looked like a way of diverting
attention from the previous five years of trouble. The videos shared by
Meta of cartoonish virtual meetings in its metaverse didn’t inspire
confidence either. The lacklustre reaction from most corners indicated
how much had changed for Facebook in almost two decades. Affection for
the brand had waned.
There was a time when Facebook was a daily log of my life; a catalogue
of how I lived in my twenties; a receptacle of all my thoughts, photos
and friendship connections. These days, like most of my millennial
friends, I rarely log in. The notifications, messages and posts simply
don’t have the same meaning any more.
When I logged on to Facebook this week, I found a feed cluttered with
ads, updates that were cross-posted to Instagram, and viral posts and
memes trying to hook my attention. But more fool me, as I’ve transferred
all my social media attention to the Meta-owned Instagram. It’s hard to
escape the company’s grasp.
Yet while it might have lost its social cachet for some people in
Ireland, Facebook is still the most popular social network globally
(just ahead of YouTube), with more than 3 billion active users. Meta’s
grip on the social media landscape is helped by Instagram’s popularity
and X’s volatile performance under Elon Musk. Membership isn’t exactly
growing, however. In the third quarter of 2023, Facebook had 408 million
monthly active users in Europe, which was a decrease of one million
compared with the previous quarter, according to Statista.
At the end of 2023, Ireland had 3.5 million Facebook users, most of whom
were women. Statista found people aged 25 to 34 made up the largest
share of users (24pc), followed by 35- to 44-year-olds (21.8pc). The
idea that it is now the preserve of more senior users isn’t borne out by
the facts: 10pc of users here are 55-65 and 7.1pc are over 70. But its
appeal to teenagers is limited: there were less than a thousand users
aged 13 to 17.
2023 wasn’t Meta’s finest year. Early on, it announced plans to lay off
10,000 workers, which was part of a wider swathe of post-pandemic tech
layoffs. It is still facing the challenge of the Chinese-owned app
TikTok being embraced by Gen Z. Plus, content moderation isn’t getting
any easier, thanks to the threat of deepfakes and AI content.
What does the future hold for Facebook and Meta? Cybersecurity
consultant and data protection expert Brian Honan says we can find clues
by looking at its past few years.
“What we’ve seen is Facebook evolving in the services it offers to its
users. We’re seeing the likes of WhatsApp become much more popular,
Instagram’s Threads, etc. Even today, people talk about Facebook being
the platform for ‘parents’ to use. So hence [the company is] moving to
other areas.”
All this will give Meta more data and information that is of use to
advertisers. The challenge, Honan says, will be to do this within
privacy regulations. It would also benefit from creating a way for users
to communicate across different platforms via one interface.
Social media strategist Samantha Kelly, aka Tweeting Goddess, says that
Facebook will keep its relevance when it comes to things such as its
groups and their appeal to local communities. “Facebook is really good
for building communities and nurturing relationships,” she says.
And for some people, there will always be a sense of nostalgia about the
good ol’ days on the site, when a ‘like’ or ‘poke’ had as much meaning
as you wanted it to have, and where the phrase ‘fake news’ didn’t exist.
Simpler days indeed.
Aoife Barry is author of ‘Social Capital: Life Online in the Shadow of
Ireland’s Tech Boom’ (HarperCollins)
Tánaiste Micheál Martin rules out adopting UK model on restricting
children’s access to social media and phones Read more
Irish Independent
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