Facebook officially launched 22 years ago, on Feb. 4, 2004. But its roots go back just a bit farther. Those origins were a warning, foreshadowing today’s communications breakdown.
A few months before starting Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg created a site called Facemash, where users could rate the attractiveness of female students at Harvard. The school had directories that included the names and ID photos of everyone living in the dorms. Zuckerberg hacked into the files, put pairs of photos side by side on a website he built, and asked the Harvard community to vote on who was hotter.
Within days, the Harvard administration shuttered the site. Zuckerberg faced complaints (and a disciplinary board) around breaching campus security, violating privacy and unauthorized use of images.
The Nov. 3, 2003 edition of The Harvard Crimson noted the “outrage from individuals and student groups”. The article quoted Zuckerberg, who used the excuse that he was simply experimenting with computer science: “I’m a programmer and I’m interested in the algorithms and math behind it.”
He did issue a letter of apology, where he wrote this: “I understood that some parts were still a little sketchy…I hope you understand, this is not how I meant for things to go…I apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect to consider how quickly the site would spread and its consequences thereafter.”
But Zuckerberg had expressed different sentiments when creating Facemash, which he published in a journal on the site and which the Crimsonalso quoted.
In one spot, he called the hacking “child’s play”. In another, referring to the photos from one dorm, “Some of these people have pretty horrendous pics. I almost want to put these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”
The DNA never really changed
In hindsight, the Facemash beginnings revealed much about what Facebook was to become.
The social network has turned people into content, attention and validation into currency, and comparison into an incessant habit. It has prioritized judgement over nuance, engagement over relationships, and outrage over insight.
It’s also ground zero for the mindset that “I saw it online, so it must be true”, which Facebook’s own design amplifies, spreading falsehoods and division.
Facebook feeds us empty calories of emotional hits, and always leaves us hungry for more. Zuckerberg was clear from the start: “I’m interested in the algorithms.”
While it didn’t invent our cravings, Facebook created the platform to scale up some of our worst impulses. Last year, Facebook was the third-busiest site in the world, behind only Google and YouTube (and ahead of fourth place and sister platform Instagram).
What has Facebook built over 22 years? Mountains of memes, miscommunication and misinformation.
Latest evidence isn’t reassuring
We can debate whether Facebook is a symptom or a cause of our current schisms, but its role in them has been outsized. The stakes and damage are only accelerating.
One study published in 2023 in Frontiers in Psychology, based on a literature review of 232 papers, showed that Facebook use is associated with eight major psychological effects (perceived anxiety, depression, loneliness, eating disorders, self-esteem, life satisfaction, insomnia and stress), as well as physiological stress and human brain alteration.
Another reportfrom the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection, released this past summer, warned that loneliness is rising globally, affecting 1 in 6 people. That’s a public health challenge, linked to an estimated 871,000 deaths annually. The report didn’t single out Facebook, but noted that digital connections don’t equal social ones.
“In this age when the possibilities to connect are endless, more and more people are finding themselves isolated,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s Director General.
The ill effects don’t stop at the psychological level. They reverberate in what we trust and believe, fracturing our shared reality.
Last year, Facebook announced that it was phasing out fact-checking. A blog on PLOS SciComm, written by a pair of scientists, noted that even with fact-checking “misinformation spreads at an alarming rate, about six times faster than accurate information.” Zuckerberg’s decision, they wrote, “is set to dramatically increase the prevalence of incorrect information and may set a worrisome precedent for other social media platforms.”
And this past fall, an Australian studyanalyzed more than 3 million posts from 25 news publishers. Researchers tracked de-identified Facebook comments to examine how misinformation spreads, including examples around election integrity, the environment and health.
“The data reveal misinformation’s real-world impact,” stated the study’s authors. “It isn’t just a digital issue, it’s linked to poor health outcomes, falling public trust and significant societal harm.”
Alone together
Sociologist and psychologist Sherry Turkle saw all of this coming. She wrote about it in her 2011 book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. As she told one interviewer, “In conversation we’re present to each other in very powerful ways. We’re alive to each other, empathetic with each other, listening to each other. When we substitute status updates on Facebook for this, we’re losing something important. We move from conversation to mere connection.”
Do we even have that?
Connection was front and centre in Facebook’s first mission statement: “To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”. In 2017, the mission statement was updated: “To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”. Yet what Facebook delivers is the illusion of community.
So happy 22nd anniversary Facebook. What a legacy. We’ve replaced genuine connection with clicks, and in-person interactions with performance. Facebook is the antisocial network.
Stuart Foxman is a Toronto-based freelance writer, who helps clients’ products, services, ideas and organizations to come alive. Connect with me here on LinkedIn, or check me out at foxmancommunications.com where I share these blogs too. More original posts coming regularly about communications, information, motivation, writing, branding, creativity, media, marketing, persuasion, messages, learning, etc.
Feb. 4, 2026