Facebook Research

Origins

Facebook is a massive social media site based in California. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg on February 4^th 2004, while he was attending Harvard. Initially limited to Harvard students, the site quickly grew, first to other colleges, then universities and high-schools.  In 2006, the site was made open to anyone above 13 years of age. The site gained the interest of major companies like Microsoft, which purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million in 2007. The price implied that Facebook as a whole was worth around $15 billion.

Today

Now, Facebook has over a billion users worldwide, and is still owned by Zuckerberg. It has pages for businesses to promote themselves, online games, and news. It allows people to keep in touch with others on a global scale, and the chat function allows quick, free communication between individuals and groups. The company is buying new technologies and companies (such as Oculus Rift and its developer Oculus VR) to both improve the current Facebook format and to diversify the company.

Negatives

• Cyberbullying,
• Under-age children are ably to sign up easily,
•  Fake accounts,
• Radicalising groups can use it for propaganda,
• The systems behind blocking and reporting users can be abused for malicious purposes.

Controversies

Inevitably, Facebook has faced controversy over time. A policy to have registering users use their real names (in order to make finding friends’ profiles easier) backfired. The system implemented had no tolerance for adopted names or pseudonyms, resulting in legitimate users having their accounts suspended. Reporting of ‘fake names’ was abused, with one user using the system to target Drag Queens using their stage names on the site.

Their policies have also related issues. Although it is understandable for Facebook to not want certain types of images on the site, removed images have included naked mannequins and kisses between same-sex couples. Additionally, a policy to have the site be policed by its users has drawn complaints that it enables harassment, by empowering those with malicious intent to report innocuous posts and have the target account shut down for a period of time.

Changes to the site layout have not always been accepted either. In September 2011, Facebook announced a new feature called Timeline, which was meant to make profile navigation easier. However, a significant proportion of users disliked the change, an issue that worsened when Timeline became mandatory for all profiles.

Finally, Facebook has had some pretty serious technical issues over the years. Long downtimes and glitch-causing outages have attracted media attention several times. An outage in 2007 created a security bug that allowed users to read each other’s private messages. In September 2009, Facebook had catastrophic loading issues for a while, and a month later an unspecified amount of users were unable to log in for more than three weeks.