Facebook

Facebook (proper spelling: facebook) is a social network operated by the US company of the same name, Facebook Inc. The company generated revenue of $70.7 billion in 2019.

Facebook allows the creation of private profiles to present oneself, company pages for business presence, and groups for private discussion of common interests. The profiles can be networked with each other through friend requests, whereby an unlimited number of subscribers (analogous to followers on Twitter) is possible, but the maximum limit of directly connected friends is limited to 5000 friends. In addition, Facebook offers a messenger as well as a development platform for creating application software.

Founded in 2004, the network said it had around 2.5 billion members who visited the site at least once a month in Q4 2019. According to Alexa, Facebook ranked 8th globally in Q4 2020 (2016: 3rd, 2019: 4th, 2020: 7th) as well as 20th in Germany (2016: 6th, 2019: 7th, 2020: 15th) among the most visited websites. As recently as May 2017, it recorded 30 million active users in Germany, according to other statistics, but that number dropped to 25.9 million by the end of 2019.

Since its release, Facebook has been criticized for poor data protection practices, especially by European data protection and security experts. The Federal Association of Consumer Centres in Germany even advised against using the service in 2010.

Facebook's importance as a news channel was documented by the Reuters Institute of Oxford University in 2015. According to this, 23 % of 1,969 respondents of all age groups in Germany received news from Facebook. In the USA, this figure was 41% of 23,557 respondents. According to a long-term study by the Technical University of Darmstadt and the Technical University of Dresden, around 91% of all online news from media companies in Germany was distributed via the Facebook Like and Share buttons in 2014. Despite this reach, however, according to its own data, only 5 % of the users' total news feed consists of news.

Name

The name refers to the so-called Facebooks (English literally: "face book", meaning: "yearbook") with pictures of students, which are distributed at some US colleges.

History

In 2003, Mark Zuckerberg developed the website facemash.com, the predecessor of Facebook, while studying psychology and computer science at Harvard University. It was a rating system for women's appearance that was only public for a few days due to protests. Zuckerberg posted photos of female students online without their permission and asked visitors to the site to choose the more attractive of two randomly selected photos.

Facebook in its current form has been around since spring 2004. At Harvard, the web-based version of the official printed yearbooks had been slow to take off due to privacy concerns. The expanded concept spread through Ivy League universities and then worldwide. The platform reached about 800 million members worldwide in September 2011. In addition to Mark Zuckerberg, students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes were involved in the project. Also, in 2004, Napster co-founder Sean Parker joined the team as an advisor and received seven percent shares in Facebook. After Parker was arrested for cocaine possession, he was forced to leave Facebook.

Facebook Inc. has been around since February 4, 2004, and its initial public offering, announced on February 2, 2012, was implemented on May 18, 2012. In the first week after the IPO, the share price dropped from $38 to around $33. The Securities and Exchange Commission accused Facebook of withholding information from small investors. These investors filed class action suits for damages.

On February 19, 2014, Facebook Inc. bought messenger service WhatsApp for $4 billion in cash and $15 billion in Facebook stock. In the course of the sale, WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum moves into the Facebook Board of Directors.

On March 25, 2014, Facebook Inc. announced the acquisition of Oculus VR. For $400 million in cash and $1.6 billion in Facebook stock, Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook.

In December 2015, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that he would sell 99% of his Facebook shares. On 23 August 2016, the Facebook boss sold the first block of shares worth €95 million to financially support the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. This had little impact on the company's share price. Since the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is not a real foundation, but a limited liability company, Zuckerberg can keep tax levies low and present himself as a benefactor in the media.

In the spring of 2018, the company came under increasing public scrutiny as the Special Investigation into Influencing the 2016 United States Election Campaign revealed that agents of Russian Federation had used Facebook to influence the US presidential campaign. It was also revealed that the British company Cambridge Analytica misused data from up to 87 million Facebook users.

Three months before the 2020 United States presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of measures to counter misinformation and false news, or fake news, on Facebook. One of the many measures was the removal of pages like QAnon that spread conspiracy theories on Facebook. Facebook Inc. said it detected and deleted a total of 4.5 billion fake accounts on Facebook from January 2020 to September 2020.

Mark Zuckerberg (2005)