official definition

disclaimer: this paragraph is written at 1am entirely from memory with the only source being the social network (2010) directed by david fincher and growing up 15 minutes away from palo alto.
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facebook is a social media platform created by mark zuckerberg and his college “friends” while at harvard university in 2004. it was originally only available to harvard students, but went on to be available to other universities, and then available to the general public. it allowed you to send friend requests to people so you could see their posts and photos on their profile. the facebook profile included basic information that acquaintances and friends alike would want to know including location, education, and most importantly, relationship status. over time, facebook has expanded and acquired other popular social media platforms, such as instagram, going on to rebrand itself as meta following a series of court cases about privacy breaches.

it's complicated

before my own account, i would use my mom’s account to see what she and my friends’ moms were posting about us. i also would go over to my friends’ houses who had (illegal) facebook accounts in elementary school, and we would video chat our other friends and play the facebook games, like farmville. overall, i had a good idea about what the platform was like before joining.

in complete honesty, a crush is what motivated me to create a facebook account. my crush only had a facebook account to communicate with, so i obviously needed an account to talk to him over facebook messenger. i made my profile, and would have a photo album for each grade that i added to every once in a while, but stopped after junior year.

in review

i had an instagram before i had a facebook, so i never really saw the need for facebook. plus, it did have a reputation for being a “old person” platform, so i rarely checked it. now, i only go on facebook like twice a year to accept lingering friend requests, check if someone got engaged, or to download an old photo. my mom doesn’t even use facebook that much anymore.

sorry my prada's at the cleaners

the meta-verse is so confusing to me (not how it works but more so why???), so i won’t even begin to try to explain or share my thoughts about it. i do think facebook is responsible for popularizing social media (and all the privacy and mental health issues surrounding it) in the 21st century. i give them credit for that.

if you can't tell, i am very very detached from facebook as a platform. i honestly just really love the social network (2010) and wanted to talk about it. (andrew garfield).