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Facebook has become so deeply engrained into culture and society that the company’s origin story as a college network for the few and privileged, programmed by former Harvard student and dropout Mark Zuckerberg and a couple of his friends, is well known. The founding myth tells the story of a 2003 date night gone bad. Bitter and frustrated, young Zuckerberg decides to create a juvenile ‘hot-or-not’ site called FaceMash, which asked fellow Harvard students to compare their female classmates and judge their relative attractiveness. Zuckerberg hacked into the websites of nine Harvard houses to gather the photos of the women. He then wrote the code to compute rankings for every vote received. Thirteen weeks after the creation of FaceMash, and after almost having been expelled from Harvard University as a result, Facebook launched as a Harvard-only social network in February 2004.

In an early interview with the American news channel CNBC, Zuckerberg described Facebook as:

An online directory that connects people through universities and colleges through their social networks there. You sign on. You make a profile about yourself by answering some questions, entering some information such as your […] contact information […] and, most importantly, who your friends are. And then you can browse around and see who people’s friends are and just check out people’s online identities and see how people portray themselves and just find some interesting information about people. (CNBC, 2004)

In subsequent interviews, Zuckerberg has reiterated these humble beginnings, stressing the fact that all he wanted was simply to connect his school. ‘We were just building this thing because we thought it was awesome’, Zuckerberg said in a 2011 interview to aspiring entrepreneurs at the Startup School. In a grandiose gesture of ‘bringing the world closer together’, Zuckerberg spoke at the first Facebook Community Summit in 2017: ‘I always thought one day someone would connect the whole world, but I never thought it would be us. I would have settled for connecting my whole dorm’ (Zuckerberg, 2017a). Zuckerberg’s origin story frames Facebook almost as an accident. He never even intended for Facebook to be a company, he claimed, it just happened (Zuckerberg, 2011a). The first attempts at setting up the company were ‘a disaster’. As the inexperienced college freshmen they were, Facebook was initially set up in Florida because one of the co-founders ‘happened to live’ there at the time. Even moving to Silicon Valley didn’t seem like much of a thought-out plan. Zuckerberg and his friends didn’t want to stay in Boston over the summer, so they went to Silicon Valley because it seemed like a ‘magical place’ for start-ups. After a year of working from their five-bed Palo Alto home, Zuckerberg and his friends finally moved to a real office in 2005. Zuckerberg seals the start-up narrative by casting himself in the role of the dedicated and nerdy software programmer. All he ever looked forward to when growing up, Zuckerberg said in a 2010 interview, was to write software after school.

Mark Zuckerberg and his company have come a long way from the nerdy college beginnings. These early stories are not just fraught with myths about the passionate hacker, free from commercial motivations. Narratives like these have helped to strategically build the story of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg as a hero of geek power. As Alice Marwick shows in her ethnography of the Silicon Valley start-up scene at the end of the 2000s, Mark Zuckerberg quickly became the epitome of the next-generation tech entrepreneur, founder and millionaire. His genius status was further cemented by extensive media coverage, conference appearances, and endless references in blogs and magazines, essentially creating a sense of celebrity that propelled people’s interest in the Zuck as a meritocratic myth (Marwick, 2013). Roughly fifteen years later, countless personal portraits have been written about the Zuck: he’s been named TIME ‘Person of the Year’ 2010, and the biographical drama The Social Network is probably the only film about a nerdy CEO of an internet start-up that has been nominated for eight Academy Awards. Yet, Zuckerberg’s journey as the CEO of one of the world’s biggest software companies is not just a happy tale. At least since the 2016 US election, with all its emphasis on fake news and Russian interference, Zuckerberg has evolved from a cultural hero for the start-up generation to something of a global privacy villain. Although Facebook had been involved in many scandals prior to that – in fact, the company is famous for its many privacy scandals – it wasn’t until around 2016 that Facebook started to look bigger, more powerful and more dangerous.

Originally, Facebook was merely a website that displayed individual profiles. In 2006, its most prevalent feature, the News Feed, was introduced. That same year, Facebook launched the first version of the Facebook API, ‘enabling users to share their information with the third-party websites and applications they choose’ (Morin, 2008). In 2007, Facebook released Facebook Platform, a set of tools and products for developers to make and adapt applications for the Facebook ecosystem. Launched at f8, Facebook’s annual developer conference, Zuckerberg called on developers ‘to build the next generation of applications with deep integration into Facebook’ (Facebook, 2007a). Facebook Platform was presented as a win-win situation and a new business opportunity for developers (and Facebook). Zuckerberg explained how developers would be able to build their businesses by getting distribution of their apps through ‘the social graph’, a term he has consistently used to describe people’s real-life connections, including friendships, business connections and acquaintances. Users, for their part, would benefit from new choices available to them through Facebook.

Also, in 2007, Facebook launched Facebook Ads. According to the company’s statement, the new ad system would allow ‘businesses to connect with users and target advertising to the exact audiences they want’ (Facebook, 2007b). For advertisers, Facebook Ads enabled them to create branded pages, run targeted ads and have access to the data pertaining to Facebook’s millions of users. Alongside Facebook Ads, two products were launched: Beacon, which caused the company’s first major privacy outcry, and Marketplace, which is still in use to this day. While critics doubted that users would be adding Cola as their friend, Zuckerberg’s vision for social advertising proved bigger, and more cynical. ‘People influence people’, he said, so by combining the social actions of friends with an advertiser’s message, ‘advertisers could deliver more tailored and relevant ads’ (the ad system will be discussed in much greater detail in Chapter 5).

In 2008, Facebook Connect was launched; an updated version of the Platform product, which allowed ‘users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site’ (Morin, 2008). Instead of having to register anew when signing in on a new Web service or app, Facebook Connect allowed users to log in using their Facebook identity. The Facebook-enabled one-click login system not only removed barriers for users to access new sites, but importantly, for those websites to access users’ Facebook profile information (Facebook, 2008). Moreover, as the company put it, Facebook Connect would allow developers to add ‘social context’ to their sites by showing users which friends had already made accounts and to ‘share content and actions taken on a third-party site with friends back on Facebook’ (ibid.).

Facebook’s perhaps most iconic feature, the ‘Like’ button, was introduced in 2009 and became an important game-changer in the business. In a thread on the question-and-answer platform Quora, one of Facebook’s most prolific engineers, Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, recounts how the Like button first started off as ‘the awesome button’ (2014). Bosworth writes how he and others conceived of the button at a hackathon in July 2007, and how the project immediately gathered interest among different product teams at Facebook. While everyone at Facebook seemed to love the idea, to Bosworth’s great surprise, the Like button did not get the positive feedback from Mark Zuckerberg that he had hoped for, and so it remained a ‘cursed’ project until February 2009 when it was finally launched to the public. As with all publicly available accounts told by company insiders, statements like these need to be treated with a pinch of salt. This is important to keep in mind, as I will refer to such PR speak from time to time throughout the book, but will not always reiterate this analytical caveat. In the case of the Like button and the meticulous timeline that Bosworth (2014) provides in the Quora thread, we also need to bear in mind how it conveniently places the invention of the button before FriendFeed’s Like button, which Facebook was accused of copying at the time.

If everybody has a Facebook story, so do Facebook’s own employees and spokespersons. The stories told by so-called insiders – employees, former employees, collaborators, partners, tech journalists etc. – raise questions about their validity and reliability. It might be tempting to treat insider accounts as being of higher order and somehow more truthful. Yet, we must be reminded that insider accounts are stories too, accounts that are fraught with their own methodological and interpretative challenges (Cunliffe, 2010; Herod, 1999). Public claims made by Facebook employees and other insiders are often characterized by the discourse of public relations, which usually aims to portray the company in a favourable manner (Bhatia, 2010). That said, I will not critically scrutinize the truth value of every public Facebook statement or other insider account referenced in this book. This does not mean, however, that we can take their claims at face value. Corporate speech is a discursive construction; it both ‘reflects and shapes a social order’ (Hoffmann et al., 2018: 201). As with any other form of narrative and storytelling, Facebook’s press releases, blog posts, corporate presentations, public speeches, revenue reports and anecdotes, are performative. Consider, for example, how Leah Pearlman, then product manager at Facebook, and part of the team that developed the awesome button, announced the launch of the button in a blog post:

This is similar to how you might rate a restaurant on a reviews site. If you go to the restaurant and have a great time, you may want to rate it 5 stars. But if you had a particularly delicious dish there and want to rave about it, you can write a review detailing what you liked about the restaurant. We think of the new ‘Like’ feature to be the stars, and the comments to be the review. (Pearlman, 2009)

In an attempt to frame the new Like button as a service to Facebook’s users, Pearlman strategically describes it as an overly positive metric. Of course, as has been raised time and again since, there was never an option to dislike, which would be the equivalent of being able to give a restaurant a one-star rating. While the concept of rating and numbering is hugely controversial (Espeland and Sauder, 2007; Esposito and Stark, 2019), it would be safe to say that the ability to hand out a five-star rating is worth nothing without the ability to also hand out a one-star rating. Yet, as Esposito and Stark remind us, ratings never mirror reality but need to be seen as second-order observations. Ratings function not to ‘inform us about how things are but because they provide an orientation about what others observe’ (2019: 3). Herein also lies the value for Facebook. Providing a Like button was not about mirroring reality but about orientation, creating a positive feedback mechanism that essentially circulates value to advertisers. The discursive construction and the use of metaphor in Perlman’s official announcement of the Like button is ultimately about corporate storytelling. Not only is Pearlman’s analogy wrong, but the ex-Facebook employee later professed regret for having played a role in creating one of the most addictive feedback loops in the advertising economy (Lewis, 2017; Karppi and Nieborg, 2020). Comparable to a five-star rating, the Like button isn’t like the restaurant rating on a reviews site. What Pearlman, Bosworth and the others conceived of back then is more akin to the reviews one would find in a travel guidebook. The whole idea behind guidebooks is to provide a selection of the best tips – or have you ever travelled to a new city with a guidebook full of mediocre suggestions?