The Facebook has a complicated early history. It began at Harvard University in 2003 as Facemash, an online service for students to judge the attractiveness of their fellow students. Because the primary developer, Zuckerberg, violated university policy in acquiring resources for the service, it was shut down after two days. Despite its mayflylike existence, 450 people (who voted 22,000 times) flocked to Facemash. That success prompted Zuckerberg to register the URL http://www.thefacebook.com in January 2004. He then created a new social network at that address with fellow students Saverin, Moskovitz,and Hughes.
The social network TheFacebook.com launched in February 2004. Harvard students who signed up for the service could post photographs of themselves and personal information about their lives, such as their class schedules and clubs they belonged to. Its popularity increased, and soon students from other prestigious schools, such as Yale and Stanford universities, were allowed to join. By June 2004 more than 250,000 students from 34 schools had signed up, and that same year major corporations such as the credit-card company MasterCard started paying for exposure on the site.
In September 2004 TheFacebook added the Wall to a member’s online profile. This widely used feature let a user’s friends post information on their Wall and became a key element in the social aspect of the network. By the end of 2004, TheFacebook had reached one million active users. However, the company still trailed the then-leading online social network, Myspace, which boasted five million members.
The year 2005 proved to be pivotal for the company. It became simply Facebook and introduced the idea of ”tagging“ people in photos that were posted to the site. With tags, people identified themselves and others in images that could be seen by other Facebook friends. Facebook also allowed users to upload an unlimited number of photos. In 2005 high-school students and students at universities outside the United States were allowed to join the service. By year’s end it had six million monthly active users.
In 2006 Facebook opened its membership beyond students to anyone over the age of 13. As Zuckerberg had predicted, advertisers were able to create new and effective customer relationships. For example, that year, household product manufacturer Procter & Gamble attracted 14,000 people to a promotional effort by ”expressing affinity“ with a teeth-whitening product. This kind of direct consumer engagement on such a large scale had not been possible before Facebook, and more companies began using the social network for marketing and advertising.
Privacy remains an ongoing problem for Facebook. It first became a serious issue for the company in 2006, when it introduced News Feed, which consisted of every change that a user’s friends had made to their pages. After an outcry from users, Facebook swiftly implemented privacy controls in which users could control what content appeared in News Feed. In 2007 Facebook launched a short-lived service called Beacon that let members’ friends see what products they had purchased from participating companies. It failed because members felt that it encroached on their privacy. Indeed, a survey of consumers in 2010 put Facebook in the bottom 5 percent of companies in customer satisfaction largely because of privacy concerns, and the company continues to be criticized for the complexity of its user privacy controls and for the frequent changes it makes to them.
In 2008 Facebook surpassed Myspace as the most-visited social media Web site. With the introduction of Live Feed, the company also took a competitive swing at the growing popularity of Twitter, a social network that runs a live feed of news service-like posts from members whom a user follows. Similar to Twitter’s ongoing stream of user posts, Live Feed pushed posts from friends automatically to a member’s homepage. (Live Feed has since been incorporated into News Feed.)
Facebook has become a powerful tool for political movements, beginning with the U.S. presidential election of 2008, when more than 1,000 Facebook groups were formed in support of either Democratic candidate Barack Obama or Republican candidate John McCain. In Colombia the service was used to rally hundreds of thousands in protests against the antigovernment FARC guerrilla rebellion. In Egypt, activists protesting the government of Pres. Hosni Mubarak during the uprising of 2011 often organized themselves by forming groups on Facebook.
Facebook encourages third-party software developers to use the service. In 2006 it released its application programming interface (API) so that programmers could write software that Facebook members could use directly through the service. By 2009 developers generated about $500 million in revenue for themselves through Facebook. The company also earns revenues from developers through payments for virtual or digital products sold through third-party applications. By 2011 payments from one such company, Zynga Inc., an online game developer, accounted for 12 percent of the company’s revenues.
In February 2012 Facebook filed to become a public company. Its initial public offering (IPO) in May raised $16 billion, giving it a market value of $102.4 billion. By contrast, the largest IPO of an Internet company to date was that of the search-engine company Google Inc., which had raised $1.9 billion when it went public in 2004. By the end of the first day of the stock’s trading, Zuckerberg’s holdings were estimated at more than $19 billion.
On January 15, 2013, Facebook announced Facebook Graph Search, which provides users with a “precise answer”, rather than a link to an answer by leveraging the data present on its site. Facebook emphasized that the feature would be “privacy-aware”, returning results only from content already shared with the user. On April 3, 2013, Facebook unveiled Facebook Home, a user-interface layer for Android devices offering greater integration with the site. HTC announced the HTC First, a smartphone with Home pre-loaded.
On April 15, 2013, Facebook announced an alliance across 19 states with the National Association of Attorneys General, to provide teenagers and parents with information on tools to manage social networking profiles. On April 19, 2013, Facebook officially modified its logo to remove the faint blue line at the bottom of the ”F“ icon. The letter F moved closer to the edge of the box.
Following a campaign by 100 advocacy groups, Facebook agreed to update its policy on hate speech. The campaign highlighted content promoting domestic and sexual violence against women, and used over 57,000 tweets and more than 4,900 emails that caused withdrawal of advertising from the site by 15 companies, including Nissan UK, House of Burlesque and Nationwide UK. The social media website initially responded by stating that "while it may be vulgar and offensive, distasteful content on its own does not violate our policies". It decided to take action on May 29, 2013, after it ”become clear that our systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work as effectively as we would like, particularly around issues of gender-based hate“.
On June 12, 2013, Facebook announced on its newsroom that it was introducing clickable hashtags to help users follow trending discussions, or search what others are talking about on a topic. A July 2013 Wall Street Journal article identified the Facebook IPO as the cause of a change in the U.S.' national economic statistics, as the local government area of the company's headquarters, San Mateo County, California, became the top wage-earning county in the country after the fourth quarter of 2012. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the average weekly wage in the county was US$3,240, 107% higher than the previous year. It noted the wages were “the equivalent of $168,000 a year, and more than 50%higher than the next-highest county, New York County (better known as Manhattan), at $2,107 a week, or roughly $110,000 a year.”
Facebook was blocked by the Chinese government in 2009. In September 2013, the South China Morning Post announced that the block would lifted in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone ”to welcome foreign companies to invest and to let foreigners live and work happily in the free-trade zone“. However, a few days later, the People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, dismissed the earlier report, reiterating the block on Facebook.
Facebook was announced as a member of The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) in October 2013, when the A4AI was launched. The A4AI is a coalition of public and private organizations that includes Google, Intel and Microsoft. Led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the A4AI seeks to make Internet access more affordable so that access is broadened in the developing world, where only 31% of people are online. Google will help to decrease Internet access prices so that they fall below the UN Broadband Commission's worldwide target of 5% of monthly income. A Reuters report, published on December 11, 2013, stated that Standard & Poor's announced the placement of Facebook on its S&apm;P 500 index “after the close of trading on December 20”. Facebook announced Q4 2013 earnings of $523 million (20 cents per share), an increase of $64 million from the previous year, as well as 945 million mobile users.
In 2014, Facebook bought Oculus VR for $2.3 billion in stock and cash, which released its first consumer virtual reality headset in 2016.
The company celebrated its 10th anniversary during the week of February 3, 2014. In each of the first three months of 2014, over one billion users logged into their Facebook account on a mobile device. As part of the company's second quarter results, Facebook announced in late July 2014 that mobile accounted for 62% of its advertising revenue, which is an increase of 21% from the previous year. By September 2014, Facebook's market capitalization had risen to over $200 billion.
Alongside other American technology figures like Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook, Zuckerberg hosted visiting Chinese politician Lu Wei, known as the “Internet czar&rdqou; for his influence in the enforcement of China's online policy, at Facebook's headquarters on December 8, 2014. The meeting occurred after Zuckerberg participated in a Q&A session at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, on October 23, 2014, where he attempted to converse in Mandarin—although Facebook is banned in China, Zuckerberg is highly regarded among the people and was at the university to help fuel the nation's burgeoning entrepreneur sector. A book of Chinese president Xi Jinping found on Zuckerberg's office desk attracted a great deal of attention in the media, after the Facebook founder explained to Lu, “I want them (Facebook staff) to understand socialism with Chinese characteristics.&rdqou;
As of January 21, 2015, Facebook's algorithm is programmed to filter out false or misleading content, such as fake news stories and hoaxes, and will be supported by users who select the option to flag a story as "purposefully fake or deceitful news". According to Reuters, such content is "being spread like a wildfire" on the social media platform. Facebook maintained that “satirical&rdqou; content, intended to be humorous, or content that is clearly labeled as satire", will be taken into account and should not be intercepted. The algorithm, however, has been accused of maintaining a “filter bubble&rdqou;, where both material the user disagrees with and posts with a low level of likes, will also not be seen. In November 2015, Zuckerberg prolonged period of paternity leave from 4 weeks to 4 months.
On April 12, 2016, Zuckerberg revealed a decade-long plan for Facebook in a keynote address. His speech outlined his vision, which rested on three main pillars: artificial intelligence, increased connectivity around the world and virtual and augmented reality. In June 2016 Facebook announced Deep Text, a natural language processing AI which will learn user intent and context in 20 languages.
In July 2016, a US$1 billion lawsuit was filed against the company alleging that it permitted the Hamas group to use it to perform assaults that ended the lives of four people. Facebook released the blueprints of Surround 360 camera on GitHub under open-source license. In September 2016, it won an Emmy for its Visual animated short “Henry&rdqou;.
In October 2016, Facebook announced a fee-based communications tool called Workplace that aims to “connect everyone&rdqou; while at work. Users can create profiles, see updates from co-workers on their news feed, stream live video and participate in secure group chats. Facebook annually has an Oculus Connect conference. Following the 2016 presidential election, Facebook announced that it would further combat the spread of fake news by using fact checkers from sites like FactCheck.org and Associated Press (AP), making reporting hoaxes easier through crowdsourcing, and disrupting financial incentives for spammers.
On January 17, 2017, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg planning to open Station F, a startup incubator campus in Paris, France. On a six-monthly cycle, Facebook will work with ten to 15 data-driven startups in the location to help them develop their businesses. On April 18, 2017, Facebook announced the beta launch of Facebook Spaces at Facebook's annual F8 developer conference in San Francisco. Facebook Spaces, a virtual reality app version of Facebook for the Facebook-owned Oculus VR googles. In a virtual and shared space, users can access a curated selection of 360° photos and videos using their avatar, with the support of the controller. Users can also access their own photos and videos, and any media shared on their Facebook newsfeed. The beta app is currently available in the Oculus Store.
In September 2017, Facebook announced it would be spending up to US$1 billion on original shows for its Facebook Watch platform. On October 16, 2017, Facebook acquired the anonymous compliment social media app tbh for an undisclosed amount, announcing intentions to leave the app independent, similar to Instagram and WhatsApp. In May 2018, at its annual F8 developers conference in San Jose, California, Facebook announced it would make its own dating service. Shares in the dating business Match Group fell by 22% following the announcement. In July 2018, Facebook was charged £500,000 by UK watchdogs for failing to respond to data erasure requests. On July 18, 2018, Facebook established a subsidiary named Lianshu Science & Technology in Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province, China, with US$30 million of registered capital. All its shares are held by Facebook Hong Kong branch. However, the approval of the registration of the subsidiary was withdrawn quickly, due to the disagreement between officials in Zhejiang province and the Cyberspace Administration of China.
On July 26, 2018, Facebook became the first company to lose over $100 billion worth of stock in one day. It fell from nearly $630 billion to $510 billion, a 19% loss, after disappointing sales reports.
On July 27, 2018, Facebook suspended the official page of pundit and political commentator Alex Jones for 30 days. The website claims that Jones participated in hate speech against Robert Mueller.
On July 31, 2018, Facebook revealed that the company had deleted 17 accounts related to 2018 American elections for national, state and local political elections. The company released a statement relating the attempts to previous security breaches saying “It's clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past. We believe this could be partly due to changes we've made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much harder.&rdqou;
On September 19, 2018, Facebook announced that, for news distribution outside the United States, it would work with the U.S. funded democracy promotion organizations, International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute which are loosely affiliated with the Democratic and Republican parties. Through the Digital Forensic Research Lab Facebook partners with the Atlantic Council, a think tank affiliated with NATO. They have made a grants to Agência Lupa and Aos Fatos, Brazilian factcheckers, to better communicate with Facebook users during the Brazilian elections scheduled in 2018.
In November 2018, Facebook launched a brand of smart displays called Portal and Portal Plus (Portal+). The screen-enhanced smart speakers use Amazon’s Alexa (intelligent personal assistant service). The devices also include video chat function supported via Facebook Messenger.