The Facebook website was launched on Feburary 4th, 2004 by Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg, along with classmates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes (Facebook, 2016). The sight was originally only available for Harvard students, but quickly became accessible for anyone who wished to use it, as long as the user was older than thirteen and had a valid email address. A unique feature Facebook brought to the table was the ability for users to add other users as “friends” on the site. By adding someone as a “friend” both users can then exchange messages and share links. Facebook enables its users to keep up to date on one another’s activities (Facebook, 2016). The intended purpose of Facebook was to connect
…show more content…
Nine years later, Facebook is the biggest source of traffic to news websites, ahead of Google (Tait, 2016). Unfortunately all of that news traffic leaves a lot of room for fake news stories to come around. There is definitely a problem when it comes to political stories as the New York Times reported last month that there is an surplus of political websites “made specifically for Facebook and cleverly engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the context of the newsfeed” (Tait, 2016). Nowadays more than ever people are having to double check what articles they are reading on Facebook for the chance of the story being a …show more content…
The website, like such “facebooks,”was originally designed to help students connect and make new friends but has continued to bloom into one of the most innovative sites of the century. Having a social site like Facebook available at the touch of a finger comes with a price, that price being you never know if what you are reading is actually true. Whether people would like to acknowledge it or not, Facebook does and continues to have a major impact on the social lives of people all over the world, serving as a major source of news for political and societal
Nine years later, Facebook is the biggest source of traffic to news websites, ahead of Google (Tait, 2016). Unfortunately all of that news traffic leaves a lot of room for fake news stories to come around. There is definitely a problem when it comes to political stories as the New York Times reported last month that there is an surplus of political websites “made specifically for Facebook and cleverly engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the context of the newsfeed” (Tait, 2016). Nowadays more than ever people are having to double check what articles they are reading on Facebook for the chance of the story being a …show more content…
The website, like such “facebooks,”was originally designed to help students connect and make new friends but has continued to bloom into one of the most innovative sites of the century. Having a social site like Facebook available at the touch of a finger comes with a price, that price being you never know if what you are reading is actually true. Whether people would like to acknowledge it or not, Facebook does and continues to have a major impact on the social lives of people all over the world, serving as a major source of news for political and societal