Happy 16th Facebook: 16 reasons why it will never die and remain the original social network
Facebook is the website that everyone loves to hate. We all use it, but that doesn’t mean we like it. Sixteen years ago, most people had never heard of Facebook. It was mostly college students using it and there were very few people over the age of 30. Now it’s worldwide and even grandparents (and some great-grandparents) are using it. There are currently more than 1.2 billion users and it is growing rapidly each and every day. This is the Facebook addiction and it’s the reason they will always be the number one social network.Here are some interesting facts about the social networking giant to celebrate the day it was founded:
Facebook is a social networking service launched as TheFacebook on February 4, 2004
It was founded by former-Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg (while at Harvard) who ran it as one of his hobby projects with some financial help from Eduardo Saverin
But before there was Facebook, there was Facemash. In 2003, as a sophomore, Zuckerberg created a site that compared the pictures of different Harvard students' faces and allowed users to rate those
In September 2004, the site launched the now infamous 'wall', which allows users to post things and receive messages on their own page
Facebook acquired popular photo sharing network Instagram for a cool $1 billion in 2012 (although the deal supposedly went down at around $715 million)
Controversy hit FB hard. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss sued founder Zuckerberg over claims that he reneged on an agreement the three had made for Zuckerberg to help them build their own social website
A huge source of heated debate, Facebook has famously been accused of propagating and spreading so-called 'fake news' - notably during the 2016 presidential election
According to Fortune, Facebook allegedly allowed fake Russian accounts to purchase over $100,000 in ads. This supposedly (or was intended to) contributed or influenced the outcome of the election
Notoriety also engulfed the social networking giant in 2018 when it was determined that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm owned in part by the right-wing donor Robert Mercer, was improperly using data
The conservative donor Robert Mercer invested $15 million in Cambridge Analytica, where his daughter Rebekah is a board member
Facebook acquired WhatsApp agreeing to pay $19 billion in cash and stock for the popular smartphone messaging service on February 19, 2014
Since 2010, Time magazine has named Zuckerberg among the 100 wealthiest and most influential people in the world as a part of its Person of the Year award
With 2.45 billion monthly active users as of the third quarter of 2019, Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide and it promises to remain so for years to come
David Fincher’s 2010 film, The Social Network, drew a direct connect between Facemash and the early origins of Thefacebook.com or what is now known simply as Facebook now
Until recently, the Real Madrid star Cristiano Ronaldo held the title of the “most-liked” page on Facebook; before him, it was Colombian singer Shakira
If you are in China, you won’t be able to access Facebook. The ban has been in place since 2009 and prohibits people from using the social media site along with some other US websites
