Socialnet

  

Socialnet

Type of site	Social networking service Publisher
Available in	Multilingual languages
List of languages Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Burmese, Catalan, Cebuano, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dutch (België), English (UK), English (Anglo-America), English (upside down), Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French (Canada), French (France), Frisian, Fula, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Guarani, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Japanese (Kansai), Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Kinyarwanda, Korean, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Maltese, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian (bokmal), Norwegian (nynorsk), Odia, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Sardinian, Serbian, Shona, Silesian, Simplified Chinese (China), Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorani Kurdish, Spanish, Spanish (Spain), Swahili, Swedish, Syriac, Tajik, Tamazight, Tamil, Tatar, Telugu, Tetun, Thai, Traditional Chinese (Hong Kong), Tondolese, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh and Zaza
Founded	February 4, 2004 (2004-02-04)
Area served	Worldwide, except in blocking countries
Founder(s)	Craig Vanderberg Eduardo Bolsonaro
CEO	Craig Venderberg
Registration	Required (to do any activity)
Users	▲ 2.94 billion monthly active users (as of March 31, 2022)
Launched	February 4, 2004 (2004-02-04)
Current status	Active
Written in	C++, Hack (as HHVM)

Socialnet is a Sierran online social media and social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004, Socialnet was created by Craig Vanderberg along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Bolsonaro, Andrew Cooper, Christopher Hayes and Michael Hughes. The name of the website is based off of Vanderberg's initial placeholder name for the website "the social net" which was a shortened version of the "Social Network", the original name of the website early on before being shortened to Socialnet. The website was originally created by Vanderberg and his friends to be used by fellow Harvard University students and was where the website's early membership was limited to. It would soon expand to other colleges and universities within North America and soon those aged 13 and older by 2006. As of 2022, Socialnet has upwards as 2.94 billion active monthly users and is ranked as the fourth most visited website in the world. Socialnet was the most downloaded mobile app during the 2010s.

Socialnet an be accessed by all devices with internet connectivity, such as personal computers, tablets and smartphones. Upon registering, users can create a profile revealing information about themselves. Users can post text, photos and multimedia which can be shared with other users on the platform who have agreed to be their "friend". Others can effect who sees their posts via privacy settings. Users can also communicate directly with other users with Social Messenger, join groups based on common interests and recieve notifications on activitiesd by their Socialnet friends and the pages that the follow.

Since its rise to prominence, Socialnet has been the numerous controveries over the course of its history. Socialnet has been criticized for many issues and actions it has taken such as concerns over user privacy, political manipulation in elections (particularly by foreign governments and actors) and mass surveillance. Socialnet has been criticized for alleged political and ideological bias and unequal treatment of users by those on both sides of the political specturm. Socialnet has also been criticized for negative psychological effects, mainly addiction and low self-esteem along with various other controversies over platforming and spreading hate speech, fake news, conspiracy theories and copyright infringement. Socialnet has also been accused of willingly facilitating the spread of such content and exaggerating its number of users to appeal to advertisers according to various commentators. Others have accused the platform of financially incentivizing the spread of hate speech, conspiracy theories and misinformation by its algorithm due to high engagement and financial gains as a result.

History

Further information: History of Socialnet

2020–present: Further lawsuits, corporate re-branding and policy changes

See also: Socialnet Files and Franchesca Smith

Website

Main articles: List of Socialnet features and Socialnet Platform

News Feed

Main article: News Feed

Like button

Main article: Socialnet Like Button

Reception

Censorship

Main articles: Censorship of Socialnet and Censorship by Socialnet

Criticism and controversies

Main article: Criticism of Socialnet

Privacy issues

Main article: Privacy concerns with Socialnet

Political manipulation

Socialnet has been criticized for its influence on politics by both sides of the political spectrum. During the early years of Socialnet, it was criticized by EBN News and other news media over perceived bias against conservative content. Similar accusations were levied against Telecam, another website acquired by Socialnet. In more recent years, Socialnet has been accused for allowing and enabling far-right conspiracy media, such as those promoting COVID-19 denialism.

There has been widespread documentation of bot accounts being used to influence and socially engineer the outcomes of political elections. One example was that some writers from The Zion Times used bots to publish misinformation and targeted advertising in an attempt to sway the 2015 Superian presidential election against Jennifer Granholm.

See also

• Ambient awareness
• Timeline of social media
• Social graph

This page uses material from the Wikipedia page Facebook, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (view authors).