Facebook

Facebook is a prominent social media platform and technology company known for its innovative business model that leveraged efficient information exchange and indirect network effects at market entry, discouraging user migration novel business model at entry. It employs lock-in mechanisms such as sunk costs from user registration and app use, alongside network effects where more producers attract consumers lock-in via sunk costs. Revenue is generated by matching content producers, consumers, and advertisers using machine learning for ad placement (Parker et al., 2016) revenue from ad matching, with over $50 billion spent on its ads in 2022 ad spend in 2022. Technologically, it maintains a closed knowledge graph called the entity graph that structures user profile data entity graph knowledge graph and participates in open source initiatives like the 'Building Leadership in an Open Source Community' guide alongside companies such as Google and Microsoft open source guide participant. Facebook faces geopolitical restrictions, being blocked in China blocked in China and having domestic equivalents like vKontakte in Russia Russian equivalent vKontakte. It has conducted controversial experiments, including a 2014 emotional contagion study manipulating 700,000 users' news feeds to observe emotional impacts, later apologizing for lack of proper consent emotional contagion experiment. Kraus et al. (2022) analyzed its metaverse efforts as potential radical innovation metaverse business model paper. Its success, alongside firms like Alphabet and Uber, challenges traditional strategic theories challenges orthodox theories, and it pledged 100% renewable energy renewable energy pledge.

Facebook serves as a major social media platform implicated in controversies over targeted advertising practices that allegedly enabled housing discrimination. Its advertising system allowed advertisers to exclude users based on protected characteristics like race, sex, and zip codes, and create custom audiences exclusion options, custom audiences. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) charged Facebook with violating the Fair Housing Act through these practices and its own ad delivery algorithms, which used user data including proxies for protected traits to predict responses and skew delivery HUD charge, ad delivery allegations. ProPublica reported that Facebook permitted housing ads to exclude users by race ProPublica report. Academic studies, including those by Till Speicher et al. and Muhammed Ali et al. from Cornell, demonstrated skewed ad delivery based on content, with audiences over 72% African American for certain ads despite inclusive targeting skewed delivery, Cornell research. In March 2019, Facebook settled with HUD and civil rights organizations, agreeing to limit geographic targeting to 15-mile radii, ban zip code targeting, and create an ad viewer tool 2019 settlement, retooling. Additionally, Facebook faced the 2017 Cambridge Analytica data scandal, where user data was misused for elections, leading to privacy changes by over 50% of UK users and 5% account deletions data scandal, UK response. Despite this, it reported 1.4 billion daily active users by end-2017 user growth. The platform also facilitated viral events like 1.6 million RSVPs to storm Area 51 and groups for organizations like Rigpa Area 51 event, Rigpa group. Its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, attracted reptilian conspiracy humor Zuckerberg humor. Connections include HUD, ProPublica, New York Department of Financial Services, and academics critiquing its algorithms.