add friends. My school friends in London all became members around the same time that autumn, approximately two years after Facebook first launched its site for a select few American Ivy League networks. Having gone to secondary school in Oslo, Norway, my Norwegian friends had yet to discover Facebook, so I sent off a couple of email invitations. One of the first messages on my Facebook wall came from one of my best friends, saying: ‘Hi Taina! Now I’m here! I’ll test this one too … usually sites like these only last a week or two for me, but now I’ve added a few pics so let’s see how it goes.’ I guess the rest is history. Not only did the site prove its staying power for my friends and me, but it also turned out to do so for a staggering 2.7 billion people worldwide.
Fifteen years after Facebook first launched, an approximate one-third of the world’s population uses one of its apps on a monthly basis (including Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram), nearly half of Americans get their news from the Facebook feed, and four petabytes of data are generated through the site each day. Facebook has become one of the most important advertising venues ever to exist, which essentially makes it an advertising business at its core. With nearly every marketer using Facebook advertising, the company made $75 billion in revenue for the twelve months ending 30 June 2020, along with a market capitalization of $805 billion as of September 2020.1 These are not just impressive numbers but numbers with profound consequences. The fact that Facebook (and Google) essentially own the market for digital advertising means that other businesses whose business models depend on advertising, such as journalism, face huge problems. As every news executive I have talked to (in the Nordic region) seems to agree, the biggest competition to their respective brands and newspapers is not another newspaper, but Facebook and its powerful grip on the ad market. This is not just a commercial problem but something that has far-reaching consequences for journalism as a whole. Fewer revenues support fewer journalists, and fewer journalists and less time to do quality reporting ultimately means a loss of public-service journalism. Facebook’s power as a data-driven and programmatic advertisement platform has also become key to the ways in which politics plays out. While just a few years ago, scholars were mainly concerned with the creation of pages and profiles by election candidates, now we are beginning to see the complex ways in which Facebook’s advertising platform is used in political campaigning and what that might mean for election results, public discourse and the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
It may seem strange to begin a book on Facebook with two paragraphs describing the mundaneness of Facebook on the one hand, and the specific nature of Facebook as a data-driven ad company on the other. Yet, this is exactly what Facebook is all about: tensions and transitions. A Facebook ad released shortly after the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 usefully brings some of these tensions and transitions into view. Barely two weeks after Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of the US congressional lawmakers in April 2018, Facebook released its biggest ever brand marketing campaign under the tagline ‘Here Together’ (see also Chapter 1). Designed as a nostalgic field trip through Facebook’s connective potentials, the ad set out to remind people why they had signed up to Facebook in the first place, promising its users to do ‘more to keep you safe and protect your privacy so that we can all get back to what made Facebook good in the first place – Friends’. The ad tells a tale familiar to many Facebook users. A story that begins with friendship, develops into an expanded network of ‘friends and acquaintances’, reaches a point of conflict where too many ‘Friends’ make you participate less, or at the very least differently, and ends with a hope for a better future – whether this future includes Facebook or not. Beyond articulating a certain structure of feeling around the ways in which Facebook has changed from a simple friendship site to something much bigger, the ad reiterates another familiar story about Facebook. This is the idea of Facebook as a social medium. In calling for change, Facebook remains firm in positioning itself as a place for friends. Yet, as I will argue in this book, this tale no longer holds true, if it ever did.
Facebook is Facebook
The core argument of the book is that Facebook cannot adequately be understood as a social medium, nor is it another name for the internet, as some would claim. Facebook is Facebook. While this may seem like a tautological statement at first, I want to suggest that, far from being useless, claiming that Facebook is irreducible to something else might be more generative than many of the metaphors currently in use to make sense of Facebook. The fact that Facebook is Facebook speaks not just to its global corporate power but, more profoundly, to Facebook becoming a concept of sorts. Much scholarly, public and corporate discourse tends to talk about Facebook in metaphorical and (sub)categorical terms. In the company’s early days, it seemed relatively uncontroversial simply to frame Facebook as belonging to the category of social media or social network site. More recently it has become more common to frame Facebook as a platform or infrastructure. Multiple metaphors abound to help us grasp this thing called Facebook, some of which we will explore in this book. As the company grew bigger, its definitional boundaries exploded. What the many definitions and conceptions of Facebook in newspaper articles, lawsuits, congressional hearings, scholarly papers and company press reports suggest is that there seems to be a growing need for clarification as to what Facebook really is. The ontological question is not just interesting for philosophical and theoretical reasons, but serves a very practical and political purpose. In a world where Facebook and its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, exercise unprecedented power and the conversation on regulation has gained a new urgency, we might have to come to terms with the notion that Facebook cannot readily be compared to something else but must be taken for what it is – Facebook.
What does suggesting that Facebook is Facebook and entertaining the idea of Facebook as a concept involve? The answer to this question begins from another, a question that I am sure many readers have already asked themselves: ‘Why do we need a book on Facebook at this point, fifteen or more years after it first launched?’ Or, as one well-meaning colleague put it, ‘aren’t you afraid that a book on Facebook is going to be a bit dated at this point?’ If we think of Facebook as primarily a social network site, there might indeed be something to my colleague’s question. But, as I want to suggest, this would be a very specific and frankly outdated way of understanding Facebook. If you think Facebook is not for you, that it has lost its cool, or doesn’t affect how you live your life, think again. Facebook is no longer, if it ever was, just a social network site. It’s a global operating system and a serious political, economic and cultural power broker. The Facebook that certain people, especially in the West, got accustomed to and signed up for more than a decade ago is far from the Facebook of today. There are many dimensions to this. One obvious point would be to say that Facebook is a work in progress. From its mission statements to its user base, technology, underlying code and design, Facebook is always changing. Along with the changing interfaces, functions and underlying system, our conceptions of what Facebook is have changed as well. If we were to go back in time, say to the beginning of the 2010s, much scholarly research on Facebook centred around questions of self-presentation, effects on self-esteem and well-being, personality traits of users, motivations for use, social capital and networking practices. In articles published at that time, Facebook was commonly considered a specific instance or subset of the broader category of social network site (SNS). Then, the label ‘social network site’ somehow lost its resonance along the way, only to be replaced by other broad categories and classification systems such as social media and platform.2
Many of the people who claim that Facebook has become insignificant or uninteresting say so because they still think of Facebook as primarily a social network site or social medium, whatever that means. Let us think of it as one of the particularly prevailing myths about Facebook. There are many more. Some myths, such as the myth of Facebook in decline and the myth of Facebook as primarily a social medium, overlap. This is not to say that Facebook isn’t declining, or that it hasn’t lost its cool. To some users, Facebook has certainly lost its appeal. A Pew study on teens’ use of social media and technology, for example, showed that while 71% of US teens reported using Facebook in 2014–15, the numbers had declined to 51% in 2018 (Anderson and Jiang, 2018). Reports from the Scandinavian countries show a similar tendency among the younger generations. In Norway,
