Facebook Wikipedia

In August 2013 High-Tech Bridge published a study showing that links included in Facebook messaging service messages were being accessed by Facebook. In January 2014 two users filed a lawsuit against Facebook alleging that their privacy had been violated by this practice. The M virtual assistant (U.S.) scans chats for keywords and suggests relevant actions, such as its payments system for users mentioning money.

Facebook and Instagram account disabled for no reason why!?!

In May 2020, Facebook agreed to a preliminary settlement of $52 million ($63.2 million in 2024 dollars) to compensate U.S.-based Facebook content moderators for their psychological trauma suffered on the job. In September 2020, the Government of Thailand utilized the Computer Crime Act for the first time to take action against Facebook and Twitter for ignoring requests to take down content and not complying with court orders. The Washington Post’s Geoffrey Fowler, in collaboration with Jadali, opened Fowler’s private Facebook photo in a browser with a compromised browser extension. To validate this proof-of-concept, they searched for Fowler’s name using NA, which yielded his photo as a search result.

• While approximately 270,000 people used the app, Facebook’s API permitted data collection from their friends without their knowledge.
• According to The Guardian, both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica threatened to sue the newspaper if it published the story.
• In August 2013, Facebook founded Internet.org in collaboration with six other technology companies to plan and help build affordable Internet access for underdeveloped and developing countries.

Internet.org

It began as Facebook Chat in 2008, was revamped in 2010 and eventually became a standalone mobile app in August 2011, while remaining part of the user page on browsers. Complementing regular conversations, Messenger lets users make one-to-one and group voice and video calls. Its Android app has integrated support for SMS and “Chat Heads”, which are round profile photo icons appearing on-screen regardless of what app is open, while both apps support multiple accounts, conversations with optional end-to-end encryption and “Instant Games”. Some features, including sending money and requesting transportation, are limited to the United States.

The practice was initially discovered in 2019, though reports indicate passwords were stored in plain text since 2012. Facebook has been criticized for allowing users to publish illegal or offensive material. Specifics include copyright and intellectual property infringement, hate speech, incitement of rape and terrorism, fake news, and crimes, murders, and livestreaming violent incidents.

Zuckerberg and co-founders chose PHP for its simplicity and ease of use, which allowed them to quickly develop and deploy the initial version of Facebook. As Facebook grew in user base and functionality, the company encountered scalability and performance challenges with PHP. In response, Facebook engineers developed tools and technologies to optimize PHP performance.

Content disputes and moderation

Owing to the same reasons, Facebook also removed 687 pages and accounts of Congress because of coordinated inauthentic behavior on the platform. In March 2024, former US President Donald Trump said that getting rid of TikTok would allow Facebook, which he called the “enemy of the people”, to double its business. He spoke after President Biden said he was ready to sign legislation that would require TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the video platform or face a ban in the US. Facebook has used several initiatives to encourage its users to register to vote and vote.

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Users can also communicate directly with each other with Messenger, edit messages (within 15 minutes after sending), join common-interest groups, and receive notifications on the activities of their Facebook friends and the pages they follow. In January 2019, Facebook said it has removed 783 Iran-linked accounts, pages and groups for engaging in what it called “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”. In March 2019, Facebook sued four Chinese firms for selling “fake accounts, likes and followers” to amplify Chinese state media outlets. The campaign was described as “payback” for COVID-19 disinformation by China directed against the U.S. In summer 2020, Facebook asked the military to remove the accounts, stating that they violated Facebook’s policies on fake accounts and on COVID-19 information.

Tumblr: Social Media & Art

• By the 2016 election, political advertising to specific groups had become normalized.
• A 20-year-old woman named Ayat Al Qurmezi was identified as a protester using Facebook and imprisoned.
• In response, Facebook is planning to take legal action against the Thai government for suppression of freedom of expression and violation of human rights.
• As Facebook grew in user base and functionality, the company encountered scalability and performance challenges with PHP.
• This significantly improved the performance and efficiency of PHP code execution on Facebook’s servers.

Facebook notified users affected by the exploit and logged them out of their accounts. In March 2019, Facebook confirmed a password compromise of millions of Facebook lite application users also affected millions of Instagram users. The reason cited was the storage of password as plain text instead of encryption which could be read by its employees.

Membership was initially limited to Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities. In February 2008, a Facebook group called “One Million Voices Against FARC” organized an event in which hundreds of thousands of Colombians marched in protest against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In August 2010, one of North Korea’s official government websites and the country’s official news agency, Uriminzokkiri, joined Facebook. A commentator in The Washington Post noted in 2019 that Facebook constitutes a “massive depository of information that documents both our reactions to events and our evolving customs with a scope and immediacy of which earlier historians could only dream”.

Apps and websites you use may receive your list of Facebook friends if you choose to share it with them. But apps and websites you use will not be chicken road app able to receive any other information about your Facebook friends from you, or information about any of your Instagram followers (although your friends and followers may, of course, choose to share this information themselves). Information collected by these third-party services is subject to their own terms and policies, not this one. Facebook’s data policy outlines its policies for collecting, storing, and sharing user’s data. Facebook enables users to control access to individual posts and their profile through privacy settings. In April 2020, Facebook began rolling out a new feature called Messenger Rooms, a video chat feature that allows users to chat with up to 50 people at a time.

This was a violation of Facebook’s consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission. This violation potentially carried a penalty of $40,000 ($50,087 in 2024 dollars) per occurrence, totalling trillions of dollars. The Cambridge Analytica data scandal offered another example of the perceived attempt to influence elections.

As of December 2023update, Facebook claimed almost 3.07 billion monthly active users worldwide. As of July 2025update, Facebook ranked as the third-most-visited website in the world, with 23% of its traffic coming from the United States. Facebook is an American social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name derives from the face book directories often given to American university students.

The Guardian claimed that Facebook knew about the security breach for two years, but did nothing to stop it until it became public. Facebook banned political ads to prevent the manipulation of voters in the US’s November’s election. Propaganda experts said there are other ways for misinformation to reach voters on social media platforms and blocking political ads will not serve as a proven solution.

A 20-year-old woman named Ayat Al Qurmezi was identified as a protester using Facebook and imprisoned. In 2011, Facebook filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to form a political action committee under the name FB PAC. In The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick said that Facebook’s structure makes it difficult to replace, because of its “network effects”. A study published at Frontiers Media in 2023 found that there was more polarization of the user-base on Facebook than even far-right social networks like Gab. Facebook provides a development platform for many social gaming, communication, feedback, review, and other applications related to online activities.

You may have heard about a quiz app built by a university researcher that leaked Facebook data of millions of people in 2014. Facebook’s privacy problems resulted in companies like Viber Media and Mozilla discontinuing advertising on Facebook’s platforms. A January 2024 study by Consumer Reports found that among a self-selected group of volunteer participants, each user is monitored or tracked by over two thousand companies on average. LiveRamp, a San Francisco-based data broker, is responsible for 96 per cent of the data. On November 29, 2011, Facebook settled Federal Trade Commission charges that it deceived consumers by failing to keep privacy promises.

Facebook uses its own content delivery network or “edge network” under the domain fbcdn.net for serving static data. Data is read from these log files using Ptail, an internally built tool to aggregate data from multiple Scribe stores. Ptail data are separated into three streams and sent to clusters in different data centers (Plugin impression, News feed impressions, Actions (plugin + news feed)). Data is processed in batches to lessen the number of times needed to read and write under high demand periods. (A hot article generates many impressions and news feed impressions that cause huge data skews.) Batches are taken every 1.5 seconds, limited by memory used when creating a hash table. Users are able to buy, sell, and swap things on Facebook Marketplace or in a Buy, Swap and Sell group.

Shadow profiles

The company removed more than 1,800 accounts and pages that were being operated from Russia, Thailand, Ukraine and Honduras. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was announced that the internet regulatory committee would block access to Facebook. On October 30, 2019, Facebook deleted several accounts of the employees working at the Israeli NSO Group, stating that the accounts were “deleted for not following our terms”. The deletions came after WhatsApp sued the Israeli surveillance firm for targeting 1,400 devices with spyware.

In 2018, a UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) select committee report had criticized Facebook for its reluctance to investigate abuse of its platform by the Russian government, and for downplaying the extent of the problem, referring to the company as ‘digital gangsters’. Facebook guidelines allow users to call for the death of public figures, they also allow praise of mass killers and ‘violent non-state actors’ in some situations. In 2021, former Facebook analyst within the Spam and Fake Engagement teams, Sophie Zhang, reported on more than 25 political subversion operations she uncovered while in Facebook, and the general laissez-faire by the private enterprise. In the run-up to the 2020 United States elections, Eastern European troll farms operated popular Facebook pages showing content related to Christians and Blacks in America.

In 2017, Facebook partnered with fact checkers from the Poynter Institute’s international fact-checking network to identify and mark false content, though most ads from political candidates are exempt from this program. As of 2018, Facebook had over 40 fact-checking partners across the world, including The Weekly Standard. Critics of the program have accused Facebook of not doing enough to remove false information from its website.