2024-02-11 04:34:07
Zuckerberg accused of having blood on his hands over product that kills people, publicly apologizes to network victims
Trillions in the bank accounts of creators and investors. A way to connect with friends. Digital photo storage. The place where you became an influencer. Multiplication of fake news. Withholding data on attempted Russian interference in the US presidential election. Scandals with users’ personal data. An apology from its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, to parents and children who are victims of sexual abuse… How exactly you will remember Facebook in the first 20 years of the social network’s existence depends on what happened to you on it.
She was born from the second attempt on February 4 in a dormitory at the American University “Harvard”. It all started a year earlier as Facemash, an online service for students to post photos and like their fellow students. Only two days after its creation, it was closed. Despite the short existence of the application, 450 people register on Facemash.
This success led Zuckerberg to register in January 2004. He then created the new social network with fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes. In the beginning, the site was only for students at “Harvard”. They could post pictures of themselves and personal information about their lives such as their lecture schedule and the clubs they belonged to.
The popularity of the social network has been growing since March 1, and students from other prestigious schools such as Yale and Stanford can join.
By June 2004, more than 250,000 students from 34 schools were using the platform, and that year, major corporations such as credit card company MasterCard began paying for advertisements on the site.
In 2005, tagging people in photos uploaded by other users was introduced and the site was open to all learners. A year later, this requirement is also dropped and the limit is that a person must be 13 years old. It is still valid today.
There were two key events for Facebook in 2006. First, Zuckerberg agreed to sell the site to the online giant Yahoo for $1 billion. The deal falls through as they lower the offer to $750 million from there. So Zuckerberg saves the site. Facebook then launched an application programming interface so that IT professionals could write software that users could use directly on the site. This is how popular games on the social network appear.
In February 2012, Facebook became a public company. The initial public offering (IPO) in May raised $16 billion, giving it market cap of $102.4 billion.
In the next 2 years, instant messaging apps WhatsApp and photo apps Instagram were also bought.
And while the official story sounds boring, it lacks sex, blood and scandals beloved by the readers of the yellow press, there are such in the history of Facebook almost from the first day.
Already in the early days of the company, a legal dispute was raised against it by Zuckerberg’s former classmates at Harvard — Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra. They claim that Zuckerberg stole their idea for Facebook, based on the social network Connect U. In the process, they receive 1.2 million shares of the new social network.
And while disputes over ideas are common in business, for Facebook scandals are yet to come. There are constant complaints that someone has created a fake profile with someone else’s photos and name and tarnishes the reputation of the real person. Often the victims are celebrities.
Then Facebook introduced the function of verifying the profiles of the stars, adding a blue tick to the real ones. Today, ordinary users can also have it, but for a monthly subscription.
Accusations of sexual harassment also creep in, but Facebook points out that they have nothing to do with it, it’s just the environment, and no one blames the house manager if a woman is assaulted in her apartment. There has been similar passivity in the wake of revelations in 2014 that US military veterans were using secret groups to upload revenge porn with their ex-partners.
The end of the loophole came in 2017, when Facebook was first accused of spreading fake news and disinformation during the US presidential election a year earlier. At first, the scandal looks like it will pass easily. Links are ultimately shared by users, and deleting them would be censorship.
However, a new scandal on a similar topic rocked the company in 2018. Then it became known that the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica gained access to the personal data of 87 million Facebook users in order to interfere in the elections and help Donald Trump won them over.
Zuckerberg even had to speak to the US Senate. He admits the guilt of the company. “We made a lot of management mistakes. But I think it’s impossible to go from a dorm company to a huge corporation without making mistakes,” says Zuckerberg.
But while he got away with it in the Senate, according to financial analysts, after the first news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Zuckerberg lost almost $13 billion of his own fortune due to the collapse of Facebook shares. It has decreased from 75 billion to 62.2 billion dollars.
A new nail in the coffin – in 2018, a sharp refusal of young people to use Facebook was noticed, is an investigation by the “New York Times”. It states that Facebook not only knew about Russia’s attempts to interfere in the US election in early 2016, but was waited more than a year before sharing this information. This was done through fake news sites, sponsored posts, and even trolls who lobbied for Trump. Because of the Facebook scandal, they now put a warning on news that is believed to be misleading or outright fake.
But that wasn’t all for 2018. Then it was also revealed that the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, had conducted a lobbying campaign. She slammed rival tech firms and George Soros. All negative posts about them were promoted by the algorithms, and those critical of Facebook were shown to very few people.
A year later, Facebook, often accused of sharing calls for violence, became the first site to broadcast a live terrorist attack. On March 15, in the New Zealand city of Christchurch, Brendan Tarrant killed 51 people and injured 40 in 4 mosques in the city with his assault rifles while broadcasting everything on social media. The 36-minute video of the atrocities was not stopped, and then continued to be shared for 18 hours later. It was because of the shervania that Facebook drew criticism. Algorithms should block all such clips within minutes. The social network was accused of leaving the videos up for so long because this time the victims were Muslims attacked by a Christian, not the other way around.
But none of this managed to get Zuckerberg to apologize. This happened only on February 1 of this year, and the occasion was a series of cases involving children who were victims of sexual abuse on the site. Some of them have been tricked by pedophiles posing as their peers into sharing their intimate footage. Others were even victims of physical abuse. The cases became so many that Zuckerberg was again called to the US Senate to answer how social networks affect children.
I’m sorry for everything you’ve been through. It’s horrible. No one should have to go through what your families have gone through, and that’s why we’re investing so much and will continue to make efforts across the industry to make sure no one goes through what your families have gone through. the billionaire told the children and their parents. The hearing examined cases of online sexual exploitation of children, with the CEOs of other social networks also participating, and in a special video, children described how they became victims of online harassment and other abuse.
Committee Chairman Dick Durbin blasted the platforms for failing to protect children, and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham told Zuckerberg that there blood on your hands because of a product that kills people.
Zuckerberg and other social media CEOs have touted their procedures for keeping children safe online. Earlier, Meta, the company behind Facebook as it was renamed in 2021, said it had spent $5 billion on safety and security in 2023.
The executives also said they will work with the legislature, parents, nonprofits and law enforcement to protect minors. Zuckerberg refused to commit to Hawley’s proposal to create a fund to compensate the victims.
Whether that will happen is not clear. Facebook’s priority today is the development of the metaverse. And what scandals she ignited, you will read in the Saturday section of “24 Chasa” on February 6, 2044.