Week 8

Facebook, founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates in 2004, is considered to be one of the 5 big companies in U.S. information technology alongside Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft. Facebook became the most popular social media platform in the world in 2009 as it reached 350 million users and 132 million unique monthly users. Facebook branched out into creating Facebook Messenger, Facebook Watch, and Facebook Portal, while also acquiring WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus, Mapillary and Giphy.

This reinforces Curran & Seaton's idea that the media is controlled by small numbers of companies that are driven by the logic of profit and power as Facebook itself was already a large, successful company before it acquired other platforms.