In June it was revealed Facebook had been experimenting on their users. Essentially the platform chose to show you certain content in an attempt to influence your mood. Unsurprisingly many were not happy being tested on.
The year started off with some more strong financial news. So with the money flowing and acquisitions opening new horizons, things were looking good. Except from something dark and horrible appearing in the distance. Social platforms, including Facebook, were being flooded with fake news stories and false information on any and all subjects.
These were often written by sites trying to drive traffic for ad revenue, or to exact some kind of political aim. Either way the truth was not central to their plans. This was an issue for Facebook who have gone on and on about how many people use their site regularly.
Now that just advertised millions of people were being exposed to lies on their platform. They decided they had to do something.
If this happened enough a note would be added for other users saying the article had been flagged as fake, while their algorithm would also factor in reports. A more positive development was the release of Facebook reactions.
By no means a major update, it showed how Facebook were still looking at some of their original functions for improvements. Then in May Facebook begun to roll out Instant Articles. These meant publishers could set up versions of their articles that would be hosted directly by Facebook.
Loading speeds would be cut dramatically, while the publishers could get revenue through advertising. This was after the platform released stats from the three months ending in June that site was used by 1. In the same month, a study from the Pew Research Centre highlighted why fake news on Facebook was so important. This made Facebook ripe for the sowing and dissemination of disinformation. There were a few other notable releases in including video calling in Messenger, the release of Facebook Live to verified public figures, and video.
Into , and as the issue of false news stories and hoaxes rumbled on, Facebook announced they now had 1. Very strong numbers impossible to argue with. So people took to arguing on their timelines instead.
They announced that posts from your friends and families would take precedence in your feed. Great for family holiday photos, not so good for news outlets. But then in August Facebook threw publishers a bone in the form of another algorithm change.
Now the platform would judge which stories were informative and then put them in front of people where the piece aligned with their interests. Although for those producing high quality journalism, they must have been frustrated that made-up news was still getting so much traction. In the midst of this, Facebook announced a new platform: Workplace.
Aimed at organisations, it essentially acted as an internal social platform for companies where employees could communicate with each other. Then in September a crisis hit as it was revealed Facebook had been publishing misleading metrics.
The company was forced to apologise for miscalculating video views and the amount of time user spent watching them. Not great timing for a company trying to fight the spread of disinformation on its own platform. By the end of the year, fake news, as in the term, was dominating conversation. People even went so far as to claim misinformation spread on platforms like it, and Twitter, swayed the election in favor of Trump, if not increasing political polarisation in the US and beyond.
Zuckerberg himself commented on this, rubbishing the idea that Facebook could have influenced the election. Whatever the truth, fake news got far more engagement than traditional media outlets in the run up to the Presidential elections. By December, Facebook changed their tune a slight. Although just tests, clearly Facebook were worried their reputation had been damaged after a month of negative press. With strong financials bringing in the new year, Facebook first major announcement of related to journalism unsurprisingly.
In an attempt to position itself as a company that wanted proper journalists to succeed they launched the Facebook Journalism Project. The first quarter saw a number of updates to the platform too. There were new options to help others access food and shelter in emergencies, reactions added to Messenger, and new suicide prevention tools. But, inevitably, attention came back to fake news. In April , Facebook announced even more plans to tackle the spread of false information. They said they would be taking three approaches: disrupting economic incentives hitting traffic to websites full of fake stories and hoaxes , building new products ranking changes and continuing user reporting and working with fact checkers , and helping people make better decisions the Facebook Journalism Project and creating a global consortium working to help people spot fake news.
Facebook continued to roll out some interesting updates, particularly the release of Facebook Spaces. This came off the back off more immersive photos and videos released earlier in the year which worked with VR headsets. Over the next few months other updates were rolled out.
Facebook continued making tweaks to try and combat fake news and video clickbait, the news feed saw some slight design changes, and they improved their clicks and impressions reporting. And then Facebook went to Congress. In September , Facebook announced they would provide Congress, who were investigating alleged Russian interference in the US elections, with ads linked to the Internet Research Agency.
It was claimed the Internet Research Agency, a Russia-based organisation, that had run 3, ads between and In October Facebook detailed in a blog post exactly what was in the ads and some data behind them. They revealed the ads had been seen by 10m US citizens, with m seeing them before the election.
The subjects they covered ranged from race issues to gun rights. Meanwhile another old problem came back to the spotlight although it had never really gone away. In December Facebook released new tools to deal with harassment. The company said they would be more proactive in preventing unwanted contact, while allowing users to ignore Messenger conversations without having to block the sender. This came after allegations of sexual assault against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein went public in October, and the ensuing MeToo campaign which spread across the internet.
Clearly the company saw that more had to be done. In January Facebook started the year off with a big change: a new algorithm. The News Feed would now be even more focused on your family and friends. This meant your own statuses and photos would be seen far more, but it would near kill off organic reach for companies, charities, and organisations.
In other words, if you ran a page, you were going to see your reach fall unless you starting paying for ads. In some ways this is a return to the original days of Facebook before ads were commonplace and you were just there to post photos of your night out.
For people who made money running businesses on Facebook, it could kill their livelihood. Nevertheless, when things got down to money, Facebook were still on the up. In February , the financial data for was released. After harassment, privacy issues, and fake news, Facebook was still raking in the cash. With the new algorithm up and running, and good news financially, was looking to be a strong year for Facebook.
There was more experimenting to be done, with Facebook announcing tests of a downvote button to go alongside reactions. But issues over privacy persisted. Over in Europe, it was ruled that Facebook was breaking the law by tracking people across the internet, and specifically not being upfront enough about it. Meanwhile, Gizmodo raised concerns about Onavo. Onavo, a VPN tool that allows users to browse the web without your provider knowing where you go Gizmodo have a good explainer on them here , was bought by Facebook in What was the problem with that?
It also scooped up data on your activities on the internet and your phone, and sent it all straight to Facebook. For example, that could track your use of apps. On the 17th March, , a story broke. People who used this app not only passed on their own personal information, but that of their Facebook friends too.
As more and more people used the app, seemingly for a bit of fun, it soon collected a momentous amount of data. Aside from this being pretty dodgy in itself, the data was then used for political purposes to support various campaigns, including those of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
It was also used by the Vote Leave, a group that campaigned in support of Brexit. Suddenly all eyes were on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, and people were not happy. There were calls for increased regulations around personal data, while many investigated how to remove themselves from Facebook.
Zuckerberg apologised for the issue and suspended Cambridge Analytica the company ceased operations itself on 1 May , and a slew of apps, from the platform to address the problems people raised.
Nonetheless, Facebook continues to dominate the social media market, generating by far the most ad revenue and maintaining over half of the total market share.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! A lifelong civil rights activist, Parks' name has become synonymous with her refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in , a defining As early as , the ongoing conflict between the North and the South over the issue of slavery led Southern George Washington, the commander of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, is unanimously elected the first president of the United States by all 69 presidential electors who cast their votes.
John Adams of Massachusetts, who received 34 votes, was elected vice On February 4, , Patty Hearst, the year-old granddaughter of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, is kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California, by three armed strangers. Her fiancee, Stephen Weed, was beaten and tied up along with a neighbor who tried to The first U.
Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. Karen Carpenter, a singer who long suffered under the burden of the expectations that came with pop stardom, died on February 4, , succumbing to heart failure brought on by her long, unpublicized struggle with anorexia.
Carpenter had a fixation with her weight from her Based on the famous fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, Snow White opened But they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them. So I'm like delaying it so it won't be ready until after the facebook thing comes out. This IM suggests that, within a week of meeting with the Winklevosses for the first time, Mark had already decided to start his own, similar project--"the facebook thing.
A few weeks after the initial meeting with the HarvardConnection team, after Mark sent the IM to Eduardo Saverin talking about developing "the facebook thing" and delaying his development of HarvardConnection, Mark met with the HarvardConnection folks, Cameron, Tyler, and Divya, for a second time.
This time, instead of meeting in the dining hall of Mark's residential hall, Kirkland House, the four met in Mark's dorm room. Divya is said to have arrived late. In Kirkland House, the dorm rooms aren't laid out in cinder-block-cube style: Mark's room had a narrow hallway connecting it to his neighbor's. As Cameron and Tyler sat down on a couch in Mark's room, Cameron spotted something in the hallway. On top of a bookshelf there was a white board. It was the kind Web developers and product managers everywhere use to map out their ideas.
On it, Cameron read two words, "Harvard Connection. Immediately, Mark asked Cameron to stay out of the hallway. Eventually Divya arrived and the four of them talked about plans for Harvard Connection. One feature Mark brought up was designed to keep more popular and sought-after Harvard Connection users from being stalked and harassed by crowds of people.
In this second meeting, Mark still appeared to be actively engaged in developing Harvard Connection. But he never showed the HarvardConnection folks any site prototypes or code.
And they didn't insist on seeing them. During the weeks in which Mark was juggling the two projects in tandem, he also had a series of IM exchanges with a friend named Adam D'Angelo above. Adam and Mark went to boarding school together at Phillips Exeter Academy. There, the pair became friends and coding partners. Together they built a program called Synapse, a music player that supposedly learned the listener's taste and then adapted to it. But the pair stayed in close touch, especially through AOL instant messenger.
Through the Harvard Connection-Facebook saga and its aftermath, Mark kept Adam apprised of his plans and thoughts. One purported IM exchange seems particularly relevant on the question of how Mark distinguished between the two projects--the "facebook thing" and "the dating site"--as well as how he was considering handling the latter:. Zuck: Because they're probably going to be released around the same time.
Zuck: Unless I fuck the dating site people over and quit on them right before I told them I'd have it done. Zuck: Like I don't think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they knew it was for dating. Zuck: and I think people are skeptical about joining dating things too. Zuck: But the guy doing the dating thing is going to promote it pretty well.
Zuck: I think the Facebook thing by itself would draw many people, unless it were released at the same time as the dating thing. Zuck: In which case both things would cancel each other out and nothing would win. Any ideas? Like is there a good way to consolidate the two. D'Angelo: We could make it into a whole network like a friendster. Stanford has something like that internally Zuck: Well I was thinking of doing that for the facebook. The only thing that's different about theirs is that you like request dates with people or connections with the facebook you don't do that via the system.
Zuck: I also hate the fact that I'm doing it for other people haha. Like I hate working under other people. I feel like the right thing to do is finish the facebook and wait until the last day before I'm supposed to have their thing ready and then be like "look yours isn't as good as this so if you want to join mine you can…otherwise I can help you with yours later.
Zuck: The thing is they have a programmer who could finish their thing and they have money to pour into advertising and stuff. Oh wait I have money too. My friend who wants to sponsor this is head of the investment society. Apparently insider trading isn't illegal in Brazil so he's rich lol. We believe he also had many IM exchanges about it with relatives and a close female Harvard friend. In January , Mark met with the Winklevoss brothers and Divya Narendra for what would be the last time.
The meeting was on January 14, , and it was held at the same place Mark met with the HarvardConnection team for the first time — in the dining hall of Mark's residence, Kirkland House. By this point, Mark's site, thefacebook. He'd arranged for Eduardo Saverin to pay for his servers.
He had already told Adam that "the right thing to do" was to not complete Harvard Connection and build TheFacebook. He had registered the domain name. He therefore had a choice to make: Tell Cameron, Tyler and Divya that he wanted out of their project, or string them along until he was ready to launch thefacebook. Mark sought advice on this decision from his confidants.
One friend told him, in so many words, you know me. I don't ever think anyone should do anything bad to anybody. Mark and this friend also had the following IM exchange about how Mark planned to resolve the competing projects:. Friend: So have you decided what you're going to do about the websites? During the meeting at Kirkland House, Mark expressed doubts about the viability of HarvardConnection.
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