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Facebook (stylized facebook) is a social networking website founded on a hidden liberal agenda that profits by exploiting personal information in users' profiles, by advertising, and by giving a platform for liberals to open fire on conservative leaders and ideals. Users can spend, or indeed waste, their time on it by uploading pictures (typically of themselves or their pets), by gossiping about others, by talking to friends, by interfering with marriages and personal relationships, and by acting like a busybody. Facebook use is correlated with underachievement in school and disruption of social relationships, such as marriage. For many young people, Facebook use replaces healthier activities and social gatherings.

"Social networking" is an inaccurate term for the site because Facebook is typically a poor substitute for real social networking. One survey shows that Facebook feeds narcissistic tendencies.

Other studies done have shown that using Facebook is associated with poorer performance in school, plus a substantial percentage of marital problems and an increase in psychological disorders in youth. Liberals nevertheless flock to it presumably because it is so unproductive or even counterproductive. Activities on Facebook have caused people to be fired from their jobs or, indeed, rejected from being hired by new employers.

Anybody with an account can create an unlimited amount of unproductive pages, which can then be "liked" by other users who can also post similar items to the page.

Facebook is based in Palo Alto, California. The name of the site is based on the paper facebooks that many colleges give to incoming students, faculty, and staff depicting members of the campus community.

As of the closing of its second business quarter of 2017, Facebook has more than 2 billion registered business and personal accounts, 83 million of which are known fakes.

Origins

Facebook was founded in February 2004 by Harvard sophomores Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz, and Eduardo Saverin, with help from Andrew McCollum. By December 2004, after expanding the site to other universities, the number of registered users exceeded one million. In August 2005 Facebook obtained the domain name facebook.com and dropped the "the" from the site's name.

2010

A feature film was made about the origins of Facebook, called The Social Network, and the mainstream media heavily advertised it. The film did not meet expectations at the Academy Awards and was number one in America for only a few weeks. Mark Zuckerberg was not involved in the creation of film and said that it was more Hollywood storytelling than reality.

It has been known among Silicon Valley technology companies that Facebook has been luring away Google employees to the extent that Google is now offering bonuses for staying with the company. On October 15, 2010, Facebook announced the release of a new email client. Internally referred to as Titan, the media has dubbed it a "Gmail Killer". Zuckerberg insists it is not a head-to-head competitor of Google's Gmail service; rather, it will be more of an instant messaging service.

Liberal policies

The world's largest online social network added civil unions and domestic partnerships to the list of relationships that its users can pick from to best describe their romantic status. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation had lobbied for the policy adoption. The option is only available to Facebook users in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France and Australia.

Facebook takes the extremist liberal view that gender is more than just male and female. Users can choose 58 types of custom genders to identify from.

Political influence

Zuckerberg has involved himself in politics in the 2016 presidential race. He has publicly called out positions held by Donald Trump as wrong. Facebook employees have asked if they should try to stop a Trump presidency.

Facebook has declared it will never use its product to influence how people on the platform vote.

In 2012, Facebook developed a tool called 'voter megaphone' raising questions about its use and ability to influence elections. Facebook secretly tampered with 1.9 million user’s news feeds.

Facebook tampered with news feeds in 2010 during a 61-million-person experiment to see how Facebook could impact the real-world voting behavior of millions of people.

98% of political donations from Facebook employees went to Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

Christian Presence

Liberal pages aside, the presence of Christianity on Facebook is overwhelming. A quick and simple search reveals that the main Christianity page has more members than all the atheist pages combined.

Conservative Groupings

While liberalism appears to be the dominant political agenda behind Facebook's staff, this has not stopped conservative groups and pages forming. The Conservative Party as well as the Tea Party Movement have created pages. A search of the pages reveals that, when comparing the "likes" system on Facebook, both the Tea Party and the Tea Party Patriots dominate more liberal pages such as "Gay Marriage USA" and even the political ideology page "Liberal".

Censorship and harassment by Facebook

Ongoing censorship and harassment by Facebook are documented at facebookcensorship.com with screenshots. Also documented is the wholesale destruction of groups that took some people years to build by Facebook's deleting all of the members. Facebook then deleted the discussion areas from "pages" to further their control and censorship. Despite its censorship, some left-wing activists claim that Facebook has not gone far enough in censoring opposing viewpoints.

Facebook temporarily banned Fox News reporter Todd Starnes for not being a liberal, giving the reason that his "politically incorrect" post violated community guidelines. Facebook has censored other conservatives, including the conservative news organization Voice of Europe simply for reporting on conservative opposition to immigration and Islam in Europe, political points of view Facebook deems "offensive." In April 2018, Facebook blocked conservative activist Pamela Geller after she posted an Associated Press article on Muslim anti-Semitism in Germany, though the organization later lifted the block.

In early 2018, following the revelation that the now-defunct data mining firm Cambridge Analytica had inappropriately acquired about 50 million users' personal information around the time of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook changed its algorithm, aiming to resolve countless privacy issues. However, this also resulted in conservative media sources being disfavored by the site compared to mainstream media sources.

Privacy issues

Facebook's Privacy Policy is continuously changing. This is not for the benefit of the users but to the monetary value they represent to advertisers. Due to the size of Facebook, all kinds of data on users' habits are monitored. In fact, the U.S. government can peek at user's lives behind the scenes if it so chooses. Facebook claims your personal information is not for sale. They make the case that it is anonymously collected data, thereby protecting your privacy. Third parties develop applications to run on top of Facebook. Users' privacy is effectively in the hands of unknown organizations. The below examples include what information is on display by every user.

• The first 6 months of 2013, Facebook shared personal data with the U.S. Government about 39,000 Facebook users.
• The NSA paid several tech companies, including Facebook, millions of dollars to cover the cost of spying on Americans.
• 6 million Facebook members had their data exposed after management found a glitch that inadvertently shared personal contact details with other members.
• Many users post their full address, e-mail address, birthday, and telephone number, and these can be available to their entire network (and, in reality, anyone). This information in the wrong hands can be used for purposes of phishing, stalking, or even identity theft.
• Some universities have begun to use students' pages to investigate underage drinking and other violations of university policy. This is very possible, since university faculty and staff can sign up for the same network as their students through their campus e-mail account.
• The so-called "news feed" has aroused some discomfort among Facebook users, as it displays all changes and status updates from their friends by default.
• The "wall" feature allows a user to post a message to another user which remains on their profile page. This posting is viewable to everyone who can view the page (which is pretty much the entire world), and shows up on the news feed for all friends of both the sender and the recipient by default.
• As with Google ads, Facebook collects profile information, and places ads on the page that reflect the user's personal information. This resulted in one man logging into his Facebook account, and seeing his wife's photograph appear in an advertisement for a dating website.
• The privacy settings on Facebook give users a false sense of security and encourage people to post things they shouldn't. As with other social networks, Facebook refuses to admit that its privacy settings that apparently allow only "friends" to see certain information are completely bogus and can easily be cracked by people with little to no hacking experience. Instead, Facebook actually encourages young users to only allow "friends" to see certain information, rather than just warning them that what they post can be seen by the world and to not post what they wouldn't want people to see.

As a free service, it is reasonable to say that the users of facebook are the product, rather than the consumers. As Andrew Lewis is credited with saying, "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." This concept is not new, but it is still valid even though it was originally introduced in reference to television. Information is valuable to advertisers, since they can use it in targeted marketing. Facebook, like other social media services, makes use of the personal information provided to users to sell advertisements.

Initial monetary value

It is rumored that Facebook generates around $1 million per week in revenue. In September 2006, Yahoo began talks to acquire Facebook for as high as $1 billion. In October, Google allegedly offered $2.3 billion. All outside offers have been rejected. 2009 estimates put a net value of $6.5 billion. 2010 estimates of the privately held company put the value at $14 billion.

In 2011, Goldman Sachs invested $500 million in Facebook. JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley was put in charge of an initial public offering of Facebook stock in 2012. The company went public at $38-per-share IPO price valued Facebook at $104 billion. As of August 2012, the company was trading down at $20 per share, a loss of $50 billion in value. As of January 2013, the stock rebounded slightly and is trading at $30 per share, however this still represents a loss of $25 billion in value. It is now possible to message the founder, Mark Zuckerberg, for approximately $100.

As tech stocks vastly increased in value in the mid-2010s, however, so did Facebook. It gained hundreds of billions of dollars in market capitalization as investors shifted from low-interest bonds into the NASDAQ.

See also

• Social media
• Twitter
• MySpace
• Google+
• Gab.ai (conservative alternative to twitter)
• Donald Trump and social media

External links

• Israel Project Video: Is Facebook Biased?
• The increasing amount of personal information that can been gleaned by computer programs that track how people use Facebook
• Chris Hughes married his partner Sean Eldridge. The gay co-founder of Facebook.
• Political and religious censorship and harassment by Facebook