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Facebook is the most popular social media service in the world with 2.32 billion monthly active users as of December 31, 2018

Facebook is the most popular social media service in the world with 2.32 billion monthly active users as of December 31, 2018. It also averages 1.52 billion daily active users as of December 2018.

Facebook was launched in February of 2004 (as The Facebook) for college students and then rapidly grew as it opened the service to more than those with a .edu email address. It was the subject of the 2010 movie called “The Social Network“.

In 2012, the social media giant offered its IPO and Facebook earned the title of the fastest company to grow to $250 billion market capitalization in the S&P 500.

In recent years, the company has been at the center of attention related to its role in the Russian interference in the 2016 US election. Since then, it’s been a continual stream of negative news for the company. They recently had all of their enterprise certificates for iOS revoked after it was discovered they had repackaged Onavo VPN as a ‘Research’ app and were paying teens $20/month to sneakily sideload it.

In early 2019, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a “privacy shift” for the company. He outlined a detailed vision for the future of the social media platform, specifically its messaging services. Notably, in contrast to how the company operates today, he says the future of the platform will be privacy-focused with features like end-to-end encryption, interoperability between its various apps like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, reducing how long it holds data, secure storage of personal data, and more.

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Facebook web new design dark mode

[Update: Available globally] Facebook rolling out new web design with dark mode, here’s how to use it

Sliding in just a day later than its announced deadline, Facebook is starting to roll out its new design for its web experience to all users. The new UI matches what the company launched on mobile last year and comes with a dark mode option when using Facebook in a browser. Follow along for how to turn on the new dark theme.


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WhatsApp group video chat

WhatsApp iOS update lands with encrypted video chat support for up to 8 people

Last week Facebook announced a new feature for group video calls, “Messenger Rooms.” In addition to it arriving for Facebook Messenger, the company said it would also come to Instagram, WhatsApp, and Portal. Now the latest WhatsApp update available today brings support for encrypted video calls between up to eight people.


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Facebook coronavirus symptom checker: 1M responses/week, publishes first data

Facebook coronavirus symptom checker mapping

A Facebook coronavirus symptom checker run in partnership with health researchers at Carnegie Mellon University has just published its first maps, showing the highest levels of suspected infections.

The survey has been collecting one million responses per week, and Carnegie Mellon is building an API which will allow other researchers access the data …


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Facebook tried to buy controversial tool to spy on iPhone users, court filing reveals

Mark Zuckerberg announces Meta lay

Over the last few years, Facebook has had a slew of privacy and security blunders and more details about one of them have come to light through a new court filing as the social media company is suing the spyware company NSO Group. It turns out Facebook tried to buy controversial government spyware to monitor iPhone and iPad users.


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