Facebook: are we being controlled by the Big F? (Rise of Zuckerberg's Facebook)

Hi and welcome to Snapshot News. I'm Sonia Briskin and today we're talking about Facebook. We use it every day. We talk to our friends, to our family, perhaps to someone on the other side of the world. But as we have seen in recent times, Facebook has become one of the most influential platforms in the world. It affects our views, our opinions and ultimately the events that unfold around us. One in seven people in the world use Facebook. That is a huge number. In fact, Facebook has recently registered more than a billion users around the world. It has become a major player in the way people interact, the way they communicate. Certainly, the freedom of information and the way that this information flows through the social media giant has been a topic of conversation recently. Particularly, as we have all seen, fact-checkers have popped up. Have we ever seen these fact-checkers maybe two years ago or three years ago? Not that I can remember. But in the last 12 months, increasingly, the posts that we make may come up with a flag that the information contained does not correspond to Facebook fact-checking requirements and your post might be blocked or even worse, completely removed. So what does this all mean for us? For our freedom of information and our ability to interact? Is the world dominated by Facebook? Let's look at the beginnings of Mark Zuckerberg. He was born on May 14, 1984 in New York. A family of Jewish descent, his father was a self-employed dentist and his mother a former psychiatrist. Zuckerberg was a genius from early days, a computer enthusiast who wrote software while he was still in high school. According to American journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, back then some kids played computer games. Mark created them. During his high school years, Zuckerberg's programming skills attracted the attention of Microsoft. In fact, he was offered $980,000 a year in an attempt to recruit his talent but Zuckerberg declined and chose to attend Harvard instead in September 2002. During his time at Harvard, Zuckerberg studied psychology and computers and was known as a programmer machine. His teachers and students commended him on his superhuman thinking when it came to computer programming abilities. In his second year, he developed a succession of programs for students to use, including the notorious one called FaceMash, which basically allows students to select the best-looking person by hacking university servers and get photos of them without the user's permission. On 4 February 2004, Zuckerberg launched the Facebook, a website initially designed for students at Harvard University, but within one month, more than half of the students' bachelor program signed up and became users. Four of Zuckerberg's Harvard classmates helped him to promote the site. To focus on his website career, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard after less than a semester. The Facebook rapidly expanded and included users soon from Columbia University, Stanford and Yale, allowing access to students and faculties at most universities around the U.S. and Canada. A successful start received the financial support of Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. Just one year after its launch, Facebook removed the from its name and acquired a domain facebook.com for $200,000 and officially changed its name to Facebook. In late 2007, Facebook had over 100,000 business pages. Places and companies that wanted to utilize that platform for commercial purposes and advertising. On 13 March 2010, Facebook officially overtook Google as the second most visited website in the U.S. and the world's leading social media company. On May 17, 2012, Facebook held an initial public offering at an agreed price of $38 per share. Its market capitalization reached $104 billion at the time, making it the most valuable newly listed company to date. By April 2013, Zuckerberg announced a $1.5 billion project to house its own new data center, codenamed Slingshot. By August 2015, Zuckerberg proudly announced that as many as one billion people around the world use Facebook every single day. That is a huge number! One in seven people in the world are on Facebook. In fact, Zuckerberg's own Facebook account has as many as 53 million followers. So, what does this all mean? Zuckerberg's certainly making a lot of money. In fact, his own personal assets surpassed $100 billion in October 2020. He is on the top five richest people in the world. So, how does Facebook have the power to influence public opinion and perhaps polarize people's views? Let's take a look at a few examples. The 2020 US presidential election was a prime case where Facebook platform became the battleground of opinions. It was certainly a polarizing event. However, what has eventuated is that the conservative views were ultimately downplayed, if not blocked. Any claims that fraudulent activities have occurred during the US presidential election were blocked by Facebook fact checkers and were not allowed to be posted. That is an infringement of people's freedom of speech, some would say. Others would say that is absolutely okay because it's spreading false information. In fact, Zuckerberg himself flatly rejected calls that Facebook should tighten controls and messages posted on it. And according to Financial Times, Zuckerberg considered himself a defender of free speech. Yet, in a very bizarre move on January 8, 2021, Zuckerberg said that Facebook would block US President Donald Trump's account indefinitely. This is the harshest penalty the social media platform has imposed on Trump's personal account in the past four years of his US presidency. Let's look at another example. Facebook has been attempting to enter the Chinese market for over a decade. In fact, it even was successful in doing so in 2008. Facebook was live in China but just for one year. In 2009, violent clashes between Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang and the Han Chinese caused information to leak out to the world of human rights abuses and the violence that was occurring there at the time. The Chinese Communist Party immediately decided that Facebook was to be banned. However, Zuckerberg didn't give up. He has continued on multiple occasions to re-enter the Chinese market. In fact, on one occasion in October 2014, Zuckerberg delighted the Chinese audience by giving a full speech in Chinese at Tsinghua University. The speech was full of tributes to Chinese history, culture and showed the company's determination to enter the market. However, not successful. Despite the fact that Facebook so far has no hope of entering China, Zuckerberg has not completely given up on maintaining good relations with the Chinese Communist Party. In September 2015, China's President Xi Jinping visited 19 of US's top leading internet giants, including Zuckerberg. According to reports, Zuckerberg shook Xi Jinping's hand and spoke for a minute and a half in Chinese and said something to the effect of, I agree with your philosophy of governance. In 2016, the Times reported that Facebook tried to embrace China's censorship policy and in fact took some steps to achieve just that. That summer, Facebook developed a tool that blocked posts from certain geographic areas. Facebook felt that this would help it enter the Chinese market. However, the tool was not enabled. Certain Chinese state-run media, despite Facebook being banned, use the platform to promote their news. Recently, we have seen some of the major news channels such as CCTV, Xinhua and China Daily utilize Facebook to post articles that promote the myth that there are no human rights abuses occurring in Xinjiang against the Uyghur Muslims, that the re-education camps and the mass incarcerations are not true. They've paid money to Facebook in advertising to publicize such articles. In fact, recently, such an article reached over a million viewers to Facebook's credit. Thankfully, that article was finally taken down. However, the damage was done and over a million people have seen the propaganda spread by the Chinese Communist Party. So Facebook has as much power to do good as it does to do evil. If misused, lives can be lost. Those who run Facebook and ultimately operate it have got a responsibility to us, the users and the world to ensure that our freedoms remain intact and that information is not artificially censored. Use it wisely, have fun, but remember, social media has its flaws and it also has its strengths. Thank you for listening. This is Sonia Briskin for Snapshot News.