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When WIRED introduced Facebook to its online readers in 2004, four months after Mark Zuckerberg launched the site with some friends from his dorm at Harvard, the first item on the agenda was the explanation. "On Thefacebook, poking is a way to say" hello "to potential contacts, a method to engage in a conversation without adding the person as a friend," said the post. "And there are a lot of things to do." From there, the story then described the most recent university campuses of the social network. All 34 of them.
If a phrase needs to be repeated ad nauseum around the 15th anniversary of Facebook's creation, it's because a lot has changed. An exclusive platform for American students, the company has become one of the world's largest and most powerful communications and advertising companies – a one-stop shop for sharing photos, consuming information, sending messages to friends, buy and sell goods – and, in some countries, basically the Internet itself. It employs tens of thousands of people, has more than 2 billion users and generates even more billions of dollars.
A 15-year retrospective of WIRED coverage on Facebook may seem like a shortsighted or selfish exercise (May I interest you in these stories from our archives ?!), but it contains useful reminders. The events of recent years have led to calls for more ethical technology – allowing engineers and designers to better anticipate the range of impacts their products may have on society, intentionally or otherwise, and to reflect on how whose tools could be used for damaging purposes, but for the good. (The trade press and the users would do well to consider these things too.)
It was certainly not clear from the start that Facebook would become the force it is today – even if Zuckerberg ended his weekly meetings by chanting "Domination". Facebook was just a wild flower in a vast social networking garden, and every day it seemed like a new crop popping up. Tribes, Flickr, Orkut, Bebo. None of them were earning money. They did not seem to have much resistance, either. SixDegrees.com had come and gone; Friendster already gave in to MySpace.
In fact, it was only after News Corp's acquisition of MySpace in 2006 that Facebook was first mentioned in WIRED magazine's IRL print pages. Facebook, WIRED, writes Facebook, unlike the Internet bubble MySpace, which News Corp hoped to find to better understand the virality of social media, "avoids uncontrollable content as a STD". So, yes, things have changed!
Emily Shur
In October 2007, Fred Vogelstein's profile, "Saving Facebook," explained how Zuckerberg led the company's transformation from "a second-tier social network to a full-fledged platform that organizes the entire Internet." .
Emily Shur
While the Facebook user base was thousands, then millions, WIRED's questions about society have changed. "What is that thing?" Quickly become "But will he earn money and (implicitly) survive?" The answer to this question has turned out to be yes.
Mark Zuckerberg has always been clear enough about his desire to get people to share their personal information, in large part, on the platform that he controlled. "Facebook has always focused on two qualities that tend to be dumped online: authenticity and identity," wrote writer Fred Vogelstein in a published profile in October 2007. "Users are encouraged to post their personal information – colleges, workplaces, e-mail addresses. Facebook also emphasizes honesty: users can usually only see the profiles of the people they are linked to, and can not link to them unless both partners confirm the relationship. relationship, it is useless to create a false identity. (That, of course., Would not always be the case.)
Early in the pages of WIRED, the portrait of a young CEO determined to radically reshape the concept of privacy in the digital age, regardless of public reluctance. Take, for example, the launch of the news feed by Facebook in 2006. Users have hated it, protesting en mbade and threatening to engage in a boycott. "The easiest thing for Zuckerberg to do was to dismantle News Feed," Vogelstein said. "But he refused. News feed was not any feature. It is the infrastructure at the base of the social graph. So, three days after the launch of the feature, he sent an open letter of 485 words to his users, apologizing for surprise and explaining how they could opt out of News Feed if they wished. The tactic worked; the controversy ended as quickly as it began, with no real impact on the growth of the number of users. "
Linking the company's focus on sharing to its business objectives was not a big leap. Two years later, Vogelstein described Facebook's plan to sell web-targeted advertising, like its rival Google. "But unlike AdSense," he wrote, "Facebook ads could be perfectly tailored to their targets." Nobody has the data we have, "says COO [Sheryl] Sandberg. As long as Facebook was free to use – and its leaders had promised it – it would sink or swim in advertising. The column of WIRED in Jargon Watch will eventually use the phrase "privacy zuckering": "v. Creation of deliberately confusing privacy policies – at Mark Zuckerberg – to encourage users of social networking sites such as Facebook to expose valuable personal information. "
While Facebook constantly tweaked the privacy settings and features of his profile to encourage – or just to make unilateral – more public information, a debate on his tactics played online, including on WIRED. On May 7, 2010, Ryan Singel wrote: "Facebook's Gone Rogue; Fred Vogelstein asked, "What will happen if the Facebook privacy revolution is a good thing?" At the time, the risks were largely related to Facebook's growth: also make your ads appallingly relevant to users, and they could panic and go away. Far enough, says the theory, and the free market would work like magic.
Zac Zavislak and Stephen Doyle
In a WIRED cover the same month, Steven Levy placed Zuckerberg at the forefront of a new generation of hackers, Bill Gates' apparent heir. "Like Gates," Levy wrote, "Zuckerberg is often accused of turning his back on the hacker's ideal because he refuses to allow other sites to access the information." provided by Facebook users. But Zuckerberg says the truth is the opposite. his company benefits from the free flow of information. "I never wanted to have information that other people do not have," he says. "I just thought everything should be more available. From all I've read, it's an essential part of the hacker culture. Like "the information wants to be free" and all that. "
Indeed, some of the first Facebook concerns expressed in the WIRED pages were about what the social network does to the Web rather than the world. In the fall, the magazine said the open Web was dead, thanks in part to closed platforms like Facebook. It was not the first time that WIRED had spoken about RIP navigation as we knew it – we also sounded the death knell in 1997 – but PointCast does not have quite the same take-off speed as Zuckerberg's rocket.
"Facebook has become a world parallel to the Web, a very different and probably more fulfilling and compelling experience, which has required the time spent drifting unnecessarily from one site to another," wrote Michael Wolff in an article blaming for his disappearance. "On them." (Chris Anderson, then editor-in-chief of WIRED, had a companion article in the same issue, claiming that the blame was "against us."). "More specifically, Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, possessed a vision of the empire: a vision in which the developers who build applications on the platform that his company owns and controls are always subject to the platform itself. not just a radical shift, but also an extraordinary concentration of power. "
In 2012, Facebook had become so entrenched in our lives that it seemed inescapable. Zuckerberg already spoke of the platform as an infrastructure and this badogy took shape. Columnist Anil Dash spoke about the specter of utility regulation in the 20th century. "It will not be long before an enthusiastic legislator sees the political necessity of drafting laws to control these businesses," he wrote. "It's up to us – the users and the press – to save them from this."
Everyone was talking about the power of network effects and the comparisons between Zuckerberg and Gates took on another dimension. "It's easier to absorb the problematic behaviors of a business when there are other choices, when you have the opportunity to take your business to another store on the street," wrote Steven Johnson in an article from "Facebook Juggernaut" published in June 2012. When a company has the whole street, every little transgression is amplified. "
And yet, the goodness inherent in Facebook's declared mission – "making the world more open and connected," wrote Zuckerberg before the company was made public that year, was still not disputed. "A more open and connected world? You must be cynical or misanthropic to oppose such a commendable goal, "wrote Johnson.
There was little doubt about the power of social media connections at this stage, not after contributing to the inauguration of the Arab Spring and Occupy movements, not to mention the smaller waves of "self-organized and hyper-connected revolts". the insistence of companies like Facebook and Twitter for their products to be forces of progress. Many observers (but certainly not all) would be slower to understand how authoritarian governments, terrorist groups and other bad actors could use the same tools.
And Facebook has continued to connect people. It has launched Internet.org to bring more people from developing countries online and, more importantly, Facebook. But Facebook also wanted to connect wherever you are, using other apps, on your cell phone, in your chat apps, at the gym. In the rooms, at some point. News Feed, which people hated so much at launch, has become a place where users spend more time than ever before.
While Facebook was de facto the information portal of millions of people, then of billions of people, the way it shaped these relationships weighed more and more. The company was constantly adjusting its news feed algorithm in search of a better user experience (and greater user engagement), in order to better bring out the messages it has. thought to see, encouraging you to continue sharing, scrolling, commenting, and loving.
"Every change in technology that feeds the news feed has consequences for individuals and businesses who are trying to exploit it to attract people's attention," wrote Jessi Hempel in 2016, at the 39, occasion of the 10th anniversary of News Feed. "Along with this power, there is growing tension about how decisions are made about the information that belongs to this thread."
The first signs that this type of system could be distorted could be skewed. In 2014, Mat Honan loved everything. Literally. On an experimental basis, he decided to love all the things that fell on his Facebook thread, no matter what he thought about it. The transformation was fast. "As day one arrived on day two, I was getting scared to go on Facebook," Honan wrote. "It had become a temple of provocation. My news feed had not only drifted further and further to the right, but strangely, it had also drifted further and further to the left – a digest of bipartisan extremism. "
Facebook was famous for letting on the content of its platform. "As constantly explain engineers and Facebook officials, the company does not judge what is in the news of anyone, provided that it makes the user happy," wrote Steven Levy in 2015
Jennifer Daniel
By the end of 2015, 63% of Americans were getting their news from Facebook. And then people started running for president. WIRED covered the 2016 election cycle more closely than ever before, as technology occupied a more important place in history. "People have often asked me why a technical publication was writing about politics," Issie Lapowsky, our senior national affairs editor, wrote the day before the vote. "It's a good question. But since mail servers, Russian hackers, Twitter trolls and WikiLeaks now play a leading role in our electoral system, the most relevant question seems to me: how could we not? "
Less than 48 hours later, as Trump celebrated his victory in the constituency, people were increasingly alarmed at how important the Internet was. Regarding Facebook, unintended consequences, such as echo chambers and misinformation, were popular topics of discussion in the days following the election, which rallied Russian trolls. But WIRED also made it clear that Facebook played a decisive role in the elections: the platform worked exactly as planned: the ads were bought by the Trump campaign and its supporters, and these ads were perfectly suited to their targets.
Welcome to the "Facebook destroys democracy" part of this particular timeline. People were upset and neither the company nor its CEO seemed to help much.
"For two and a half years, the integrity of Facebook as a place that" helps you communicate and share with the people of your life "has been completely undermined because it has served as the center exchange for propaganda, misinformation, fake news and fraudulent accounts, "wrote columnist Virginia Heffernan in the November 2017 issue." More serious still: Facebook may not have simply been vulnerable to the information war; he may have been an accomplice.
Facebook's social mission of connecting the world was no longer a defense against the slippage of society. Suddenly, that could have been the problem.
"The idea that more speech – more participation, more connection – is the highest and simplest good, is a common chorus in the technology sector. But a historian would recognize this belief as a mistake, "wrote Zeynep Tufekci in the February 2018 issue, devoted to freedom of expression. Facebook not only connects Egyptian democracy-loving dissenters and video game fans Civilization; it brings together white supremacists, who can now meet much more effectively. It helps link the efforts of radical Buddhist monks in Myanmar, who now have much more powerful tools to spread the incentive for ethnic cleansing – fueling the world's fastest growing refugee crisis. . "
Eddie Guy
WIRED's cover of March 2018 showed a picture of Zuckerberg looking bruised and offended, allegedly damaging the CEO's reputation after a two-year period that we described hyperbolicly (or not). ) as "a hell". As editor Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein wrote, the story of Facebook was now "of a company and a CEO, whose opto-optimism was crushed then that they have learned the innumerable ways in which their platform can be used for diseases. From an election that shocked Facebook, even as its fallout besieged society. Among a series of external threats, internal defensive calculations and false starts that have delayed Facebook's consideration of its impact on global business and the minds of its users. And, in the last chapters of the tale, of the serious attempt of society to redeem itself.
This tale is far from over. Since the election of 2016, Facebook has proposed a range of solutions to its various problems: war rooms to protect elections, artificial intelligence to eliminate rule violations, truth-checking partners to curb the spread of fake information, partnership with researchers and law enforcement to detect foreign manipulations on its platform. Last May, Zuckerberg told Steven Levy that it would take "three years" to fix Facebook, although the definition of "Facebook fixes" and the way the world is supposed to measure that still remains unclear.
At the same time, it seemed that a new scandal was breaking out against Facebook almost every week in 2018 – a trend that continued in the new year. "Facebook has certainly changed, but it is hardly repaired," wrote Lapowsky, referring to the turbulent year of the company. After what appeared to be the scandalous thousandth revelation – and subsequent apologies and the promise of doing better – Vogelstein asked, "Why does anyone have to believe Facebook any more?" Mark Zuckerberg's social network is always bigger and more powerful than ever. But to transform an old trope, great power implies great responsibility.
WIRED has covered a lot of new Facebook sites in the last 15 years. But some lessons from the Facebook era have always existed. A year before WIRED never mentions Facebook, and several months before, Zuckerberg was reversing the switch of his Cambridge site, the magazine was publishing a special issue of June 2003, published by Rem Koolhaas, as "a catalog of news". Emerging spaces, germ of the culture to come. "
"Whether it's contagious diseases, fashionable fashions or stock market trends, we have to start thinking in terms of networks," reads one in an entry. "Sometimes they help us and sometimes they hurt us – being in touch can be good or bad. But in any case, networks are always present. And when not just you, but no matter who can be connected to anyone on Earth in just six steps, what happens is faster than you think. "
Read more: Facebook at 15
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