Facebook first began on the campus of Harvard University in 2003, under the name Facemash. Originally used as a university-centered platform where students could rank the attractiveness of others, Facesmash only attracted 450 people in its two days of existence, before it was shuttered by Harvard. Facebook took the form of a more traditional social media network in 2004, but its availability was limited to students of a few prestigious US universities. Within a few months, Facebook (TheFacebook at the time) expanded to 34 colleges and universities, and had more than 250,000 users. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Facebook crossed the one million user mark by the end of that year. Students in any high school or college were allowed to join in 2005, and anyone over the age of 13 in 2006. Today, Facebook has over than 3 billion users every month.
The first adopters of Facebook were likely attracted by the university-centered approach to social media. While students at our school widely use apps like YikYak today to communicate with other students, Facebook provided an early version of school-limited social media. There are a variety of reasons as to why some people were late adopters of Facebook, or have yet to join Facebook. Since the site began with college students in mind and with a young user base, older people likely may have felt ‘out of place’ joining. There are also a myriad of downsides to using social media sites like Facebook. Studies have shown that users who deactivated their Facebook accounts became less politically polarized, and improved their overall wellbeing. Additionally, Facebook has been the subject of privacy concerns for years, which has led some people to avoid joining the site altogether, or delete their existing accounts. While each person is entitled to their own opinions on Facebook and social media as a whole, I plan to continue using social media, while being careful to preserve my own mental health and privacy online.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Facebook
https://tech.co/news/facebook-bad-stanford-study-2019-02
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/timeline-facebook-s-privacy-issues-its-responses-n859651
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