Facebook case study

Facebook was founded under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University in early 2004, with the initial intention to create a student directory containing student profiles and pictures (Hodge, 2006; Guo, 2010). Moreover, the website became available for public use in 2006 and by this stage in its development, anyone over the age of 13 could create a profile if they possessed an e-mail address (boyd & Hargittai, 2010; Guo, 2010).

 

Facebook is characterised as a social media website which “combines features of e-mail, instant messaging, photo-sharing, and blogging programs, as well as a way to monitor one’s friends’ online activities” (Cohen, 2008: 6). Thus, Facebook functions as one-stop platform that combines various social activities for its users. According to Fuchs (2011), the defining features of Web 2.0 social networking websites, like Facebook and Myspace, are that they allow users to craft their own profiles, link such profiles together in visible social networks, and allow users to communicate with one another. Thus, on social networking websites, users utilise self-created profiles that act as avatars, to interact with one another through interconnected social networks (Solove, 2007; Guo, 2010). In addition, such profiles often contain personal information such as full names, contactnumbers, e-mail addresses, physical addresses, occupations, friendship networks, photos, records of activities, personal preferences, and demographic information (Solove, 2007)

Facebook, however, overtook Myspace’s popularity by 2008 and became the most popular social media website in the world (Guo, 2010). By 2015, Facebook was worth at least 245 billion US Dollars (La Monica, 2015). Globally, the website has over 968 million daily users and 1.49 billion monthly users, with nearly 844 million mobile daily users and 3.31 billion mobile monthly users (Facebook, 2015a).