With hundreds of millions joining Facebook, the platform began to change the world (Associated Press)
Today, Facebook blows out its 20th candle, a few days after its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, stood before the Senate and the families of a group of victims, apologizing for the pain his famous platform caused. This is in addition to the many scandals that haunt the platform related to the loss of privacy, and the time it consumes in distancing us from our social ties and ideals. And our other activities.
But despite this, I sat thinking about the beginnings of this invention, how I got to know it, what my feelings were at that time, how I feel about it now, why it changed, and the role it played in my life.. Memories came back to me when I returned to my first post and my knowledge of Facebook passed since its appearance in the Arab world. 2006 to the present day.
Mark Zuckerberg (right) founded the Facebook platform with his friend Dustin Moskovitz 20 years ago (Getty)
(2006 - 2011)... Beginnings are always innocent
I found myself scrolling down towards the beginning of my timeline. It took a long time to get there, but unfortunately I couldn't get to the first post as the post stopped uploading in mid-2010.
But the whole thing seemed strange and exciting to me, and memories began to come back to me when I saw pictures that I had posted some time ago and friends’ responses to them, and I remembered the feeling when you add a person to open a list of other people for you, and I remember my feelings when I saw friends that I would not have met again if it were not for Facebook. .
As hundreds of millions joined Facebook, the platform began to change the world, for better and worse, but my friends list grew, my posts changed, and even my convictions that I had held during the twenty years changed.
During the first five years at Facebook, which began in 2007; After almost a year of being available globally, everyone was amazed by this platform and its ability to connect people together and share special moments in their lives.
The emergence of the iPhone helped spread Facebook. From approximately 2006 to 2008, after its opening to the general public, the platform became more popular.
Then around 2008, the major media elite and politicians started using it, realizing its power. This power became evident around 2010, when the Arab Spring events broke out, and I witnessed how Facebook became a tool for the masses to respond to authority.
There was a slogan at the time: We use YouTube to broadcast the revolution, Facebook to organize it, and Twitter to share it.
This invention, which we expected would contribute to raising the voice of the oppressed, especially when we saw its impact in the Arab Spring, soon its goals and method changed.
The amount of what Facebook users post about their personal lives is so huge that it gives anyone the ability to create a digital map (Getty)
(2012 - 2017)... Money and influence are the source of the evils of technology
A symposium was held at the GITEX conference in Dubai in 2012 to raise awareness about privacy and how social media platforms, including Facebook, can violate our privacy.
I remember how, after this symposium, many parties in the Arab world began to verify the accuracy of the information contained therein, and I found that the amount of what users publish on the platform about their personal lives is very huge and gives anyone the ability to create a digital map that shows the most important information about users.
At that time, information such as personal identification cards, work letters, and even dates of birth and children’s information; It is easy to get on the platform for many users.
This matter excited advertising companies that were searching for these mines of information, and Facebook also found it an important source of funding and increasing profits, as its profits reached their peak in the period between 2010 and 2015.
But advertising companies and Facebook were not the only ones who were searching for our information and attracting our attention. During this period, a class of users appeared who became called influencers, and who were initially a group of users who shared their political and revolutionary ideas. However, after the Arab Spring, most of this class became merchants who They sell their posts to paying brands who want to benefit from their followers and the audience that follows their posts.
Yes, during this period, Facebook has turned into a free market for information in which politicians, artists, merchants, and even parties and groups that did not have a voice sell their wares, which created a strange situation that appeared at the beginning of the 2016 American elections.
In his election campaign for the second term in 2012, US President Barack Obama used social media, including Facebook, to reach the youth segment and publicize his election campaign. Thus, he is considered the first US president to use the platform in electoral propaganda.
But his successor, Donald Trump, who won the US presidential elections in 2016, is considered by some to be the first to be able to use the platform to shift public opinion - or what is known as “political polarization” - in a systematic manner, according to what was revealed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2017, which showed The huge impact that social media platforms play on our lives, and alarm bells have rung around the world signaling a new era for this platform, which has many mistakes.
Mark Zuckerberg before the Senate and the families of a group of victims, apologizing for the pain his platform caused (Reuters)
(2017 - 2023)... Facebook from reviving the revolution to dead
Since 2017, Facebook has consistently found itself under intense scrutiny and at the center of numerous controversies. From privacy violations to growing concerns about monopolistic practices, the company has faced increasing regulatory scrutiny and public backlash, with many users choosing not to use the platform as a result.
Since approximately 2017, Facebook has been actively used to spread extremist partisan ideals, and has become a platform that exposes extremist racist groups, according to several sites, including the New York Times.
Also, one of the big problems at that time is that Facebook does not allow researchers to access its data to find out what is going on behind this huge platform. There are many groups - especially neo-Nazis or fascists - who use the platform, according to reports from several institutions.
Society needs to have a conversation about what technology should do for us, and what types of regulations are needed, organizations say. But it is unclear whether there is political will in the halls of Congress or Meta's board of directors to do so.
The European Union recently issued a law requiring platforms with more than 500,000 monthly users; By opening its data to researchers. So we'll see what Facebook is willing to do to maintain its relevance in a huge market.
As for our Arab world, in 2016, after Facebook concluded an agreement with the Israeli occupation authorities, the targeting of Palestinian content on the platform increased under the framework of a dedicated set of policies, including closing or suspending the accounts of journalists, media organizations, activists, and any page that talks about the issue, in addition to Accounts of ordinary users, under the pretext of removing “hate speech” or confronting “anti-Semitism,” which prompted Palestinian users to launch campaigns protesting the censorship imposed on their voices on the world’s largest social media platform.
The latest of these policies was the restriction on content supporting the Palestinian cause on the pages of activists supporting an end to the war on Gaza.
Because Facebook was exposed during these years to many fines and cases related to violating privacy and protecting children, the company’s president found that the solution lay in changing the name of the company, which began to suffer from loss and the reluctance of many users, which is what it did in October 2021 when the company’s name was changed. to "meta", and the brand's focus shifted towards the metaverse; Facebook's digital world mixes virtual reality and augmented reality.
Meta's vision, as it says in its statement, aims to redefine online interaction and experiences with a range of innovations, including virtual reality headsets and generative artificial intelligence.
But can Meta bring life and passion back to Facebook and polish its image in front of its Arab users with these new technical games, or is “Meta” a product that was born dead because of Facebook’s heavy and bad legacy in the Arab world, which it will be of no use to put on virtual reality glasses to forget about it.
Source: Al Jazeera + websites