2024-02-03 21:00:00
Mark Zuckerberg (shutterstock photo, unsplash) On February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, a 20-year-old student at Harvard University, decided to set up a website for himself and his classmates, and opened the ‘Facebook’, within 24 hours about 1,200 students had already registered on the website more
Zuckerberg himself did not know that the site he built would explode beyond the university, and build a new technological language that changed the entire world and became a global corporation worth billions, and also turned the student into a young billionaire. The social network changed the way humans communicate, and opened the door to more social networks, and this is only the tip of the iceberg.
In 2008, Zuckerberg launched Facebook for the iPhone, which had already become a household name, and in no time Facebook became the application with the most downloads in the world. Only in the last quarter of 2023, the company estimated that over 3 billion users used the application per month – which earned it another title and made it the most useful application ever created.
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A year later, in 2009, Facebook launched another small addition, the well-known like button, which became a truly universal symbol. A button that allows people not to comment, but only to confirm that they liked what they saw. Zuckerberg was the first to air the light option, which today is taken for granted, a small addition, which changed an entire language.
Although Facebook has lost a bit of its power in recent years, it is still used by an estimated one and a half billion people every day. And yet, the site is making headlines due to scandals related to it or through it. One of them, and the most talked about, happened in 2012 when Facebook hid posts from the news feed of about 689 thousand users without their knowledge, just to conduct a social experiment and check what effect it had on the statuses they posted, or the likes they made.
As a result of the experiment, those users saw in their feed pictures of dead dogs, or cute babies, and not the content of their friends. As a result, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer issued a public apology in which she explained that the experiment was part of her effort to woo Indian advertisers, and to tailor advertisements to users outside the US, and in her apology she explained that Facebook had no intention of angering its users.
In the same year, the Instagram app bought Facebook, making history, which made many users cry out to Zuckerberg that he was making the mistake of his life. But the goal was to connect the successful platforms. Zuckerberg therefore published a message on Facebook itself “If you are reading this, then thank you for letting me and my team serve you. Helping a billion people connect is the thing I am most proud of in the world.”
At the beginning of 2014, Facebook continued to expand and acquired the well-known WhatsApp application, which was bought for 16 billion dollars. WhatsApp already had 450 million users at the time, and Zuckerberg saw the potential growth in uniting the successful platforms. Today, WhatsApp is approaching a billion users every month, and Facebook has a large part of the platform’s success.
Let’s jump to 2021 when Zuckerberg wanted to renew the platform, with the rise of artificial intelligence, and created the ‘meta’, a name for the new Facebook. Meta is an abbreviation of Metaverse, a jump into the new virtual world that is being built in these moments and continues to develop and grow. The company decided to align with AI technology and put artificial intelligence as a priority. Studies on the subject of the ‘meta’ announced that since the name change, the company has gained a lot of exposure, therefore its influence will be great and will go hand in hand with the development of artificial intelligence in our lives.
Even here in Israel, there is a well-known scandal under the auspices of the website in question, when in 2018 the well-known singer Sarit Hadad recorded a cover for the band “Hive” for the song “I gave her my life”, and the one who was not satisfied with this was none other than the musician Ephraim Shamir, who used the platform for blatant statements on the Internet .
Shamir wrote about Hadad’s song “Isa Goel, Daesh with a song.” The statement caused a stir here in Israel when surfers claimed that it was a racist statement. This is not the first time that Shamir has caused an uproar on a sectarian basis on Facebook, in 2015 the singer wrote “The Jewish Arabs are Arabs like Hamas.” This statement joins another host of controversial statements he published on the platform in question that did not leave surfers indifferent.
Facebook, which has built a new wave of celebrities, jobs, global and national scandals, continues to break conventions, and evolves together with all of humanity. It is a tool that built and destroyed human lives, exposed secret operations, took steps for and against politicians, and opened the door for “trolls” on the net, and also for everyone, to express their opinion, and change their life, if they want. The digital platform has undoubtedly changed the technological world forever, 20 years later, and this is still only the beginning.
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