When the film was released in 2010 The social network by David Fincher, few imagined that that dazzling story of twenty-something billionaires, grudges and morals tested through technology was just the beginning. Facebook was only six years old then. and, in some ways, it had already changed the way 500 million people communicate, more than the population of the United States and Canada combined.
That year Facebook had not yet gone public, it had not yet acquired WhatsApp or Instagram and of course the Cambridge Analytica scandal had not occurred. Oh, and the Metaverse was still something I only mentioned in science fiction stories.
It also seemed complicated that at some point Facebook as a company would end up giving up its own name. in the midst of a change of course that has not yet been fully defined.
What hasn’t changed since then is another name: Mark Zuckerberg. Today marks 20 years since the founding of a website, a social network, a platform and a company that has shaped the Internet, its culture and the current economy to the point of becoming, for some, a great contemporary villain. This is a tour of his history and all the changes he has caused.
Of TheFacebook to Facebook
On February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, then a Harvard student, launched a portal focused on connecting students at his university: TheFacebook.com. It was all a success. Before, he had made a similar attempt with a portal in which students’ physiques were judged. And before him, others like Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, had tried to launch what would later be called a social network a few years earlier.
Zuckerberg’s idea wasn’t completely new (and the Winklevoss brothers famously sued for allegedly plagiarizing an idea they shared with him), but it succeeded.
In just a few months, after expanding to Ivy League universities, it surpassed one million users. That’s when he changed the domain to the current one: Facebook.com.
Four years later, there were already 100 million users. The following year, 200. Today it is estimated, despite the fact that many people no longer use their accounts, that just over 1 in 4 humans on Earth have a Facebook account.
And the beginning of their bad practices
Facebook’s exponential growth was not only due to its ease of use and ability to connect people, but also its ability to collect user data.
The first major growth of the social network came after the purchase of Onavo in 2013, shortly after its IPO a year earlier.
Onavo, an Israeli app, worked as a kind of mobile VPN that actually served Facebook to collect a multitude of information about how users used their phones and with what applications.
That was the time when, due to the lack of regulation and awareness, Facebook could extract information from our contacts, even without them having an account, only having access to our data and our agenda.
Cambridge Analytica, the great scandal revealed in 2018 and which, at least momentarily, put a spotlight on how Facebook had been treating our data, relied heavily on these gaps.
But in addition to obtaining data for advertising and political purposes, Facebook has also always been in the eye of controversy for many other reasons. Without going any further, its lack of control over the content and the use that its youngest users had of it and later of Instagram, as reflected Zuckerberg’s recent appearance again before the United States Senate.
The great economy of internet advertising
The use of Facebook and Instagram as an advertising platform is known. As users interacted with the platform, Facebook collected data about their preferences, interests and behaviors. This information was used to personalize the user experience and target advertising more effectively.
The origin of Facebook’s advertising business dates back to 2006, when the platform introduced its first targeted ads, allowing advertisers to reach specific audiences based on their demographic information and preferences. This advertising strategy became Facebook’s main source of income and allowed it to offer free services to its users.
Facebook has created, together with Google, an online advertising duopoly that still largely persists. and that has marked how the network has been built. Segmented advertising has affected entire businesses and sectors, media and has also been used, of course, for political purposes, as we collect in Hypertextual in this special on the use of Facebook Ads by political parties.
When the family grows: The acquisitions that boosted your empire with Instagram and WhatsApp
As Facebook continued to expand, it also looked for opportunities to acquire other companies that would complement its vision and strengthen its position in the market. In 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram, the then-popular photo-sharing app, for $1 billion. Today it looks like a bargain.
The acquisition of Instagram allowed Facebook to enter the visual social media market and attract a younger audience. Over time, the daughter social network was eating away at the mother in profitability and users. Facebook became the parents’ social networkwhile Instagram grew without a competitor in its segment until the emergence of TikTok.
In 2014, Facebook took another big step towards the giant it is by acquiring WhatsApp, an instant messaging application. With over a billion users at the time, WhatsApp became a key tool that gave Facebook an even larger user base and data to work with.
Their incorporations also brought with them information about how Zuckerberg controlled the assimilation process of these apps. Their founders ended up leaving both WhatsApp and Instagram after a few years within the Facebook structure.
Does anyone remember Cambridge Analytica?
The Cambridge Analytica scandal was just one of the many challenges that Facebook has faced in its history, from which it has nevertheless managed to emerge without any of them managing to completely bring it down.
From privacy and security issues to accusations of censorship and content manipulation, Facebook has been at the center of controversy on numerous occasions. It is estimated that in these types of breaches alone, half of the more than 2.3 billion accounts have been exposed in some way.
Despite scandals and criticism, Facebook has managed to maintain its dominant position in the social media market. Although it has seen a decline in user retention, especially among younger users, the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp has offset this loss to some extent.
The metamorphosis to Meta
Partly as a result of this wear and tear, At the end of 2021, Facebook as a company gave way to Meta in an unexpected move. Zuckerberg moved his finger from advertising to the metaverse, although perhaps only so that we would all watch while ads continued to be his main source of income and artificial intelligence was configured as his true future.
Facebook’s name change to Meta is a reflection of the company’s efforts to diversify and move away from its problematic image as a social network. Oculus, acquired in 2014, became the new pillar of the company’s until now modest hardware.
20 years with Zuckerberg at the helm
And yet, despite even changing his name, the figure of Zuckerberg has become the only CEO of Big Tech. and founder who remains in office.
The power sharing system on the company’s board protects it. Despite his lack of morals, Zuckerberg has proven for many years to be the leader that a company needs to keep its shareholders happy, so it is not so easy to think about his downfall.
In the current context, which in itself is a change of context, it has managed to continue growing the share price and presenting good results. It cannot be said that he has not known how to remain standing, whether he likes it or not, and being one of the most profitable and solvent technological leaders for his own interests and those of his company.
We don’t know if in another 20 years Facebook will still exist as Meta or not, but The impact it has left in these first two decades of its history is surely still noticeable.