20 years ago, Facebook introduced us to the brave new world of social networks, where we posted, shared and liked for the first time. Then the scandals started. The author tells how Facebook accompanied her.
In 2009, Facebook introduced the Like button; Since then, the thumb has been used as an indicator of one’s own popularity on the platform.
Benoit Tessier / Reuters
Everyone knows Facebook today, three billion people – almost half of humanity! – have a user account there. The time before Facebook seems like a long time ago – but I still remember exactly when I first heard about the social network. It was 2005, I was twenty and spending an all-inclusive vacation in southern Spain, where my American friend Kelly was constantly checking this new website, “The Facebook,” on the computer in our hotel lobby. To do this you had to have an email address from an American university; I didn’t have one, so I looked enviously over Kelly’s shoulder as she pulled up status updates from our mutual friends and posted photos of the Alhambra.
Facebook was the hip new thing from the USA that I longed for like I once longed for new seasons of American television series, music albums or clothes from Abercrombie. The wait was soon over: in 2006, “Facebook,” as the platform was now called, opened up to users outside of the American university landscape – and conquered the globe.
During an exchange year in Chile, I also opened an account. The brave new world of social media was amazing: now I could see and read what friends around the world were doing. How you presented yourself on the platform quickly became important. I was constantly uploading new photos: Astrid having breakfast, Astrid climbing mountains, Astrid after one too many glasses at a party. As part of the first generation of social media users, it didn’t dawn on me that some photos are best left unposted because human resources departments also look at Facebook profiles. Or that Facebook analyzed every second of my behavior. Or that it followed me across the internet.
Instead of asking new acquaintances in college for their cell phone numbers, I said: “Are you on Facebook?” It was all of them. Just three years after launching in Harvard’s dormitory, 50 million users worldwide had registered. But that was just the beginning: After Apple made smartphones suitable for the masses with the iPhone, Facebook also released its own app in 2008. From now on, the social network was always in my pocket.
Soon you could also “like” posts and photos there. In February 2009, Facebook introduced the “thumbs up” button; The company originally considered an asterisk or a plus sign. The thumb became an indicator of one’s own popularity. I looked closely at how many and which friends liked my photos and posts and what they commented on. The search for the right profile picture filled evenings, as did stalking new acquaintances. Who was that cute new guy in the lecture? All it took was a name, Facebook provided answers.
Suddenly the parents’ friends were also on Facebook
The turning point came when one of my mother’s friends registered on the platform and sent me a friend request. It was 2010, Facebook had half a billion users, and the baby boomer generation had joined the millennials. I would have preferred to reject the request, but in real life that would have been a faux pas. So I clicked “accept,” but now thought more carefully about which photos and information I shared. More and more often, I removed my name when friends tagged me in a photo.
Professionally, I used Facebook more intensively than ever before: at journalism school we learned what a treasure trove of data was hidden there for research and how to make use of it. The platform now had one billion users in 2012. I contacted possible protagonists for articles and researched the Facebook profiles of interviewees. Hardly anyone had even taken a look at their data protection settings; almost every user was like an open book. That was also a reason why I became more and more silent on Facebook.
But I still didn’t understand the true core of the business model back then – and apparently neither did many others. When Mark Zuckerberg – a millennial like me – took his company public in 2012, there was great skepticism about how the social network would even make money. This was reflected in the share price; throughout the first year it was well below the issue price of $38 (today the shares are at $400).
At the time, only a few people understood that Zuckerberg praised his company as the altruistic network that brought the world closer together – but that he had also built a gigantic advertising platform. Together with number one, Google, Facebook soon had 50 percent of the global digital advertising market. The personal information and likes that users constantly shared enabled Facebook’s advertisers to tailor their approach to target groups. At the same time, the posts we created created an endless stream of new content around which these ads were placed. It’s as if readers wrote the texts for their newspaper themselves and also filled out questionnaires for the advertising industry.
Facebook absorbs WhatsApp and Instagram
Even though I posted less and less myself, Facebook continued to expand deeper into my life. In 2014, the company incorporated the WhatsApp messaging service – suddenly Mark Zuckerberg also had this user data from me. He had already bought Instagram in 2012; Dozens of other companies have followed suit to date.
Things were starting to get out of hand when Facebook introduced the Live feature in 2015. Users could now transmit their video recordings in real time, and everyone suddenly had their own personal television channel. What happened next was actually predictable: people committed crimes, suicides and rampages in front of a live audience.
Facebook’s ugly side became increasingly apparent. In the American election year of 2016, foreign actors attempted to manipulate the election campaign in this way. They understood the platform better than founder Zuckerberg did: Russian trolls, for example, took advantage of the fact that the algorithm rewards content that is of great interest to users. For example, it was possible that 156 fake news posts were read 760 million times on Facebook. Moscow had turned the social network into a weapon and directed it against the USA itself.
At several congressional hearings in recent years, CEO Zuckerberg has had to justify the scandals on his platform.
Sipa via Imago
In 2018, we learned that it wasn’t just the Russians who understood how to exploit Facebook’s treasure trove of data. The company Cambridge Analytica also skimmed the profiles of 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge or consent and used them to create a political behavior model.
The outrage was huge. Under the slogan #DeleteFacebook, users turned their backs on the platform. Wouldn’t this be the time to delete my account too? Torn back and forth, I scrolled through my Facebook photos: I had uploaded around 500 photos and I was tagged in another 200 photos. Nowhere else did this digital breaking latest news of my life between my 20s and 30s exist.
And there were my Facebook friends, now 624. I didn’t have a cell phone number or email address for so many of them. Facebook was our digital telephone around the world. Did I really want to cut this line? I decided against it – and as it turned out: most of the others did too. The much-hyped Facebook exodus did not happen, on the contrary – in 2019, the year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the platform celebrated 2.5 billion monthly active users. Years later, it turned out that Cambridge Analytica’s oh-so-powerful predictive model had ultimately been ineffective.
Today the platform is a mixture of Yellow Pages and eBay
Today I’m glad to still have the account. The group has now been renamed Meta by Facebook, but still makes 98 percent of its sales from advertising. I now live and work as a correspondent in the USA, and here Facebook still plays a central role in everyday life: In Facebook groups I find jogging partners, used furniture and answers to visa questions.
For me, Facebook is no longer a social network like it was when I was a student, but rather a mixture of Yellow Pages and eBay. Nostalgically, I click through the old photos of Kelly and me from southern Spain. She now posts on Instagram, like so many of my American friends. I don’t do that, my private life is practically non-existent on social media. This is better for my mental health. With all the scandals, Facebook has taught me that you have to think carefully about what you are feeding the algorithms of social networks and what self-responsibility looks like in the digital age. I am very grateful to Mark Zuckerberg for this lesson.