According to the information compiled for the anniversary of Facebook’s founding, Facebook, which was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his 3 friends in his dorm room at Harvard University on February 4, 2004, continues to be the most used social platform worldwide.
FACEBOOK’S YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW…
The company has grown rapidly over the years by incorporating popular applications such as WhatsApp and Instagram.
The company, which has changed its image and decided to continue its journey under the name “Meta” in 2021, continues its work in the shadow of the scandals experienced over the years and criticisms regarding data security, competition violations and censorship. The company revealed its metaverse vision, especially after it started losing young users.
Facebook, which was first founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes only for Harvard University students, has experienced an increase in the number of users since 2006, as it became a format that anyone can become a member of.
While the number of users of the site has increased rapidly since then, the company began to offer other products and services such as “Facebook Messenger”, “Facebook Watch”, “Facebook Portal” and “Facebook Marketplace” in addition to the social networking platform.
While Facebook went public in 2012, it has acquired many companies since its founding. The most prominent acquisitions among these companies were Instagram and WhatsApp. The company announced that at least 3 billion people use one of its products every day.
While Facebook bought Instagram, a photo and video sharing application, for $1 billion in 2012, it paid $19 billion for instant messaging app WhatsApp in 2014.
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Facebook has faced many scandals and criticisms in the more than 10 years since its IPO.
There are accusations that the data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica, headquartered in London, used the personal data it collected without permission from the accounts of 87 million Facebook users to influence the presidential elections in the USA in November 2016 and the European Union (EU) referendum in the UK in June 2016. , caused a crisis on a global scale.
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also fined Facebook a record $5 billion for a data breach in 2019.
“Monopoly” investigations have been opened in the USA and the EU about Facebook, which is also at the center of discussions regarding competition violations. In the USA, in 2019, 8 states, led by the New York Attorney General’s Office, launched an antitrust investigation against Facebook, while in 2020, 46 states and the US Federal Trade Commission filed two lawsuits against the company accused of “making monopoly and competition impossible”.