The Social Network

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

If you’re a regular reader, you know that I’m a big history buff, so it will likely not surprise you that I’m into celebrating significant anniversaries of important events, both of the local and broader variety.

So, in that spirit, here’s a little history you probably won’t find on the “Today in History” page… We’re coming up on the 19th anniversary of the launch of Facebook. That’s right, the world’s most used social networking site is old enough to vote (although the snarky part of my brain wants to say that Facebook has been knee-deep in the election process for years).

Facebook, in it’s original form “The Facebook” launched on Feb. 4, 2004, as a way for college students to network. Well, over the course of Facebook’s evolution, it has been through a lot of change. I was a little late to the game, not getting a Facebook page until 2009, which isn’t supertardy, since it really started out as a localized college student site on the campus of Harvard University and then a few other colleges, but by the time it went worldwide in just a few years, it was already pretty clear that it would be a very big deal and part of our every day lives.

See VIEWPOINT, page A5 VIEWPOINT

From page A4

For many , it was their first foray into social networking outside of email, but tt wasn’t the first such site.

MySpace was around before it… and it wasn’t the last. We’ve had Friendster and Four-Square and now there’s Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok and others are newer, and by many people’s account cooler these days. We’ve got dating sites and hook-up apps and we’ve even got social media that caters to your very specific worldview, like Truth Social or Farmers Only (on Only Fans, but let’s maybe not go there…

But Facebook has perhaps done it best as far as casting a wide enough net to catch people of virtually every demographic.

And it has done it the worst… there have been widespread claims that the 2016 election was heavily meddled with through social media, specifically Facebook. Of course, Twitter might be the new face of what’s wrong with social media these days thanks to Elon Musk. I wonder if there’s a conspiracy theory out there that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk secretly worked out this whole Twitter mess to make people think Facebook was more reliable by comparison. People do love their internet conspiracies…

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to be an old man yelling about how technology and social media are runing the workd or anything, but Facebook has gone from being a place where you could find your old classmates, let everyone know what you had for dinner, or share a funny picture of your cats to a place where bitter, angry people tell other bitter, angry people why they’re wrong and spread misinformation about everything from politics to the coronavirus to aliens building the pyramids. If that’s your thing, more power to you, but for me, I’d rather be playing “Words with Friends” or harvesting my crops in “Farm Town.”