Platform Politics of Facebook
Nick Adamson
Micah Nakamoto
Giang Nguyen
Background and History of Facebook:
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his roommates and a fellow Harvard University student Eduardo Saverin. The social network itself was really limited at first, then it was expanded to make it available for users. Facebook predecessor is Facemash. It was created by Mark Zuckerberg and three of his classmates - Andrew McCollum, Christ Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz. It was just a type of “hot or not” game. In 2004, Zuckerberg wrote the code for a new website ‘theFacebook,’ he then realized "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available ... the benefits are many." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook)
In February 2004, Zuckerberg launched ‘theFacebook’ and within 24 hours they had “somewhere between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred registrants”. He continued to develop the site even after dropping out of Harvard University his sophomore year. In June 2004, ‘theFacebook’ was renamed to ‘Facebook’ after purchasing the domain name facebook.com for $200,000.
From October 1st, 2005 the network then expanded to Ivy League Universities, then out of the U.S Universities, and eventually high schools and companies. In 2007, Facebook had 100,000 business pages. In 2010, the network invited users to become beta testers. As of February 2011, Facebook had become the largest online photo sharing website and expected to have 100 billion photos by summer 2011. By that time, over 350 million users accessed Facebook thru their mobile phones.
On March 12th, 2012 ‘Yahoo!’ filed a suit in a U.S. federal court against Facebook. On April 24th, 2014 Facebook and Storyful announced a new feature called FB Newswire. Facebook headquarters complex are located in Menlo Park, California and its former headquarters are in downtown Palo Alto California. Facebook income was very positive as they hired Sheryl Sandberg as the Chief Operating Officer in March 2008. In 2014, Facebook revenue was 12,466 million U.S dollar and the net income was 2,940.
Features of Facebook:
‘Facebook’ is a social networking site that allows users to create their own individual profile and page. A person can construct a profile for free on the facebook website by creating an account with a username and password. You can chose to make your Facebook account private or public. If you set your profile to private then only people you are friends with on Facebook will be able to see your profile and comments. Whereas if you leave your profile on public then anybody can see your page/profile. A major concern to privacy advocates is the ability of third party app developers to access your friendlist and other private information in your profile without even knowing. People on facebook are given the freedom to follow any profile or page. When you follow someone their posts and updates will show up on your news feed. If the person choses to follow you back then they will see your posts and updates on their feed. Facebook allows users to communicate with friends through messaging, posting pictures, liking or commenting on other people's pictures and putting information on your profile that you want people to know about you. The news feed is composed of status updates, photos, links, and app activity from people you follow on Facebook. Facebook can be accessed on the Internet, your smartphone and many other devices.
Performative Infrastructure:
Algorithms are used in Facebook by displaying the best list of content to its users’ on their newsfeed page. To make the best list Facebook uses a few criteria like your activity and interest, or what your friends liked/commented on and their interests. It also takes into account who is your best friend and how popular is the content that is currently being liked and commented on the most. Some of the things that Facebook uses algorithms for are their news feed, top friends, friend suggestions, graph search, sponsored posts/advertising, and year in review. Facebook uses information from its users’ interests and the content that they and their friends liked and commented on to give users the best list of news feed and help them with suggestions for friends or while searching.
Structural Affordances:
Information on Facebook such as pictures, status updates and comments can stay up for a long time. This is affordance is known as persistence and means that information or things people say can stay around. A person can remove pictures and other information in their profile they have posted but some things can be saved by others who have seen it. Information such as pictures can be easily duplicated on facebook. This affordance is called replicability. Users can repost these duplicates and people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from the original. Scalability is very limited on facebook compared to other social networking sites because on facebook you must get approval to follow other users on Facebook. Users can broadcast their content to other users to try attract more followers. Profiles can be searched through search engines such as google and yahoo. On Facebook users can search for other people and follow them or check their page out if it’s a public page. The use of search engines to find other people’s profiles could lead to privacy issues since some people have personal thing in their profiles.
Facebook does have all 3 dynamics Invisible audiences, Collapsed Contexts, The blurring of public and private (Danah Boyd (2010).”Social Networks sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics and Implications.”In Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites(ed. Zizi Papacharissi)
Facebook can be used as an environment to meet new people, a place for individuals to express themselves to the others through means of communication; an advertise or commercial page, etc. it cannot be limited.
This social network has changed users’ participation. People can now access to unlimited contents just by looking up specific matters or using hashtags. A lot of pages about specific matters are created which will benefit people interested in it. It also gives suggestions as the users update their profiles. The more details people put online about themselves the more accurately Facebook will give suggestions (and predictions). With its algorithms Facebook has succeeded in connecting people who have same taste, habit and so on. This success has attracted more and more users and continue to ‘shape’ their participation.
Facebook makes itself a prime place for public communication because it allows users’ to freely message and view other peoples content. Facebook also has a feature to create specific pages which allows users’ to freely express their opinions with other people that share the same view or are able to comment on other pages that they disagree with. For more of a romantic type of communication facebook allows users’ to send private message to others.
Possibilities and functionality in a poly media environment, Facebook allow users to write posts, update status, upload videos and pictures, send messages with their customized privacy. Especially, their unique function is enable users to set up pages, groups to share ideas, communicate and to have their own community they want to build. Also, if some sources contain inappropriate information, media, they can be reported or banned.
The functionality of Facebook has unlimited possibilities that nowadays people can have multiple accounts, speak their own ideas, opinion anytime, discussing with the other about politics, society or privately discuss in closed group. Users can also commercially advertise or sell online products through facebook pages. Although Facebook have such a great control but eventually, users can use the page with their intention with unlimited possibilities.
(http://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-revenue-and-net-income/)
Note: all the information was collected and quoted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook)
https://www.facebook.com/help/327131014036297/
