2016: The Year Facebook Became The Bad Guy

There is so much that Facebook knows about each and every single one of their users. People do not realize how much information the site can figure out from simple situations such as liking a post. There 98 different data points that Facebook captures about every single user. The company gathers information like "your income, your net worth, your home's value, your lines of credit, whether you have donated to charity, whether you listen to the radio, and whether you buy over the counter allergy medicine" (Bergstein 88). That is only seven of ninety-eight different data points that the company captures. Facebook is a site that is not very safe for its online users. All of this started happening in the year of 2016. During that year Olivia Solon wrote an article title "2016: The Year Facebook Became the Bad Guy." In this article there are several different instances where people question what Facebook is and how reliable the site is. With the many recent historical events that have been going on it is very hard to say whether or not the site is reliable. Robert McChesney stated "when you get companies this big they are no longer just a threat to democracy, they

It may have started out that way, but it has become so much more than that. The site started out only for students at Harvard University and then quickly went viral and became a part of the entire world. According to the Pew research center 68 percent of all American adults are using the Facebook site (Bergstein 89). Facebook has a very high influence on today's society for every single age group. Zuckerberg calls his social networking site a "global community," but Bergstein describes the site a little differently by saying "Facebook is all about concentrating power in one network" (Bergstein 87). What kind of impact does Facebook have on the world though? Is it a good or a bad