This allowed Cambridge Analytica to target Facebook users with political advertisements during the US presidential elections and the UK referendum, which in turn could have swayed their stance on either topic. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies.
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Cite this Article Format. Bellis, Mary. The Most Important Inventions of the 21st Century. Is Mark Zuckerberg a Democrat or a Republican? Biography of Mark Zuckerberg, Creator of Facebook. How to Upload a Video to the Internet. The case, however, was dismissed by a federal judge when the findings of a magistrate judge were upheld showing that the evidence provided by Ceglia had, indeed, been faked.
You won't be surprised to hear that the first Facebook profile belonged to none other than Mark Zuckerberg himself. The first "real" Facebook user, with an id of 5, was Chris Hughes, Zuckerberg's friend, and co-founder of Facebook.
The next few dozen accounts appear to have been Zuckerberg's friends, classmates, and roommates. Interestingly, Business Insider conducted an investigation a few years back and discovered the first 20 Facebook accounts and their relationships with one another.
According to their findings, after Zuckerberg and Hughes, the next few accounts were as follows:. While we have already touched on some of the early lawsuits against the company, Facebook has also taken fire for a few other, allegedly suspect, activities. One major bone of contention surrounding Facebook is its apparent dissemination of "fake news".
Coming to the attention of journalists during the U. According to these claims, these ads both contributed to and influenced the outcome of the elections. Whether you personally believe this or not, the accusations continue to damage public attitude towards the company.
We need to be careful not to discourage sharing of opinions or to mistakenly restrict accurate content. However, Facebook is still mired in claims that it allows fake news and dangerous propaganda to be disseminated on its site. More recently, Facebook, and Zuckerberg in particular, have been accused of doing nothing to reign in dangerous hate speech on the site, and even of, allegedly, encouraging the dissemination of such speech through company policy. In June , Facebook began shedding advertisers, who claimed they no longer wanted their ads to appear next to posts from hate groups.
Due to the nature of Facebook's business model, it is also regularly accused of questionable data harvesting scandals. One of the most notable occurred in , when they were engulfed in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Allegedly, the data firm was improperly using personal data of Facebook users to create psychological profiles of them for later political use. This data, so the claim goes, was then used, in part, to help influence elections in the US and UK. This ultimately led to Zuckerberg being called before the U.
Mark Zuckerberg, 23, founded Facebook while studying psychology at Harvard University. A keen computer programmer, Mr Zuckerberg had already developed a number of social-networking websites for fellow students, including Coursematch, which allowed users to view people taking their degree, and Facemash, where you could rate people's attractiveness. In February Mr Zuckerberg launched "The facebook", as it was originally known; the name taken from the sheets of paper distributed to freshmen, profiling students and staff.
Within 24 hours, 1, Harvard students had signed up, and after one month, over half of the undergraduate population had a profile. The network was promptly extended to other Boston universities, the Ivy League and eventually all US universities.
It became Facebook.
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