Everyone is lining up to take their shot at Facebook — and that’s including the HBO comedy, “Silicon Valley.”
The series returned on Sunday night with a new twist to its intro, with the Facebook logo briefly converting to Russian. Several eagle-eyed viewers spotted the diss — you can check it out below:
HBO’s Silicon Valley throwing some subtle shade Facebook’s way on the Season 5 premiere. 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/JoDeOo7BBH
“Silicon Valley” appears to be taking a dig at Facebook’s PR fiasco, where Kremlin-linked trolls leveraged the social network to target voters during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially brushed the issue aside, saying it was “crazy” to think it played an important role in the road to the White House.
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Facebook over the years
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Facebook over the years
The original Facebook homepage from 2004 with a small picture of Al Pacino in the top left corner.
At the same time, Facebook introduced the Mini-Feed. But the entire concept of a News Feed resulted in some very public outrage. Some users even went so far to call one of Facebook's product managers the devil.
Facebook also split its instant messaging into a different app called Messenger in 2011. It's now got more than 800 million monthly users.
Photo courtesy: iTunes
Facebook swapped out the connected world diagram for a phone in 2012 as its users moved from desktop to mobile. Today, over 800 million people access Facebook on mobile everyday.
Facebook also owns a bunch of other popular apps, most notably Instagram, which the company bought for $1 billion in 2012. With more than 400 million monthly users, that seems like a steal nowadays.
Photo courtesy: Business Insider
2015 was a big year for Facebook that saw its first ever day with one billion users online simultaneously. The company had figured out how to make money from mobile too, turning it into a $300 billion business.
Today, more than 1.5 billion people use the social network every single month.
Photo courtesy: Facebook
And more than 1.4 billion people use it on their mobile phones every month. Not bad, considering 12 years ago smartphones didn't even exist.
Photo courtesy: Facebook
Here's the Facebook homepage today, on its 12th birthday.
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Zuckerberg’s tune changed, however, last fall, after Facebook told Congress more than 100 million users had been hit by Russian propaganda. The 33-year-old chief exec said he was “dead serious” about the issue, adding, “protecting our community is more important than maximizing profits.” In the aftermath, Facebook added content moderators and tools to check whether users had been following pages with Russian backers.
On a lighter note, if you wanted to read how much Richard, Dinesh, Jared and Gilfoyle will be spending on rent for Pied Piper 2.0 this season, check out our episode “fact check” here.
