Facebook has changed for the first time the slogan that has always appeared on its home page for more than 10 years: From “it’s free and will be forever” the social network has moved on to “it’s quick and easy.”
The change comes at a time of intense scrutiny for the company led by Mark Zuckerberg, who over the past few months has had to testify before the US House of Representatives and the European Parliament to account for the successive privacy scandals that have affected the company, including the massive Cambridge Analytica leak, interference in the 2016 US presidential election and several cases of security breaches or loss of user data.
For more than a decade, Facebook has been enticing users to sign up to its social network under the slogan “it’s free and it will be free forever,” while always stressing that for them “users are not the product.”
Now, quietly, it has decided to change that slogan to sell itself as a “quick and easy” service.
“Facebook is not free and never has been,” summarizes to Business Insider Spain Doctor of Law and expert in digital law José Antonio Castillo, one of the first to detect the change on Twitter.
“Facebook’s currency was and is the personal data of its users. But It has never been free because data is worth a lot of money,” He explains, stressing that the data sector generated €257 billion in the EU in 2014, and will reach more than €643 billion in 2020 (representing 3.1% of EU GDP), according to data from the European Commission.
However, Facebook has been saying since at least 2008 that its social network is free on its homepage (which then read “It’s free and anyone can join”), according to the Archive.org initiative’s Wayback Machine tool.
Mark Zuckerberg’s company changed this slogan between August 6 and 7, as can be seen in the images accompanying this article: if you wish, you can visit a mirror version of the Facebook website from August 6 and August 7 to check this change.
Facebook has made the change to both its English website (Facebook.com) As in the rest of the versions of its social network, including its website in Spanish (Facebook.es) Now on Facebook.com appears “It’s quick and easy”.
Contacted by Business Insider Spain, Facebook has noted that “people will always be able to access Facebook for free.”free of charge“), and regularly updates its products, including its home pages. However, the company has not agreed to share what has motivated the change.
Facebook has stopped saying it’s free, but you still pay the same amount: what’s changed then?
Facebook has changed its home message, but It doesn’t look like they’re going to charge you money for using an account on their social network now, especially at a time when users are spending less time on its platform due to the rise of other more popular networks (although they continue to grow and although the company is obtaining better results than it expected).
Castillo highlights how Facebook users pay the company, although often unwittingly, believing that by not paying money a service is free (“with this the exchange contract has been revived”).
“A while ago there was a quiz on Facebook called ‘Which Disney character are you?’ That test was done by many people, I did it myself, and the results were used by Cambridge Analytica to segment the population into six strata of political opinion.“When Trump was running for office, he hired this company and knew which areas he needed to target and which others he had already won. That’s worth a lot of money,” he recalls.
The data that Facebook collects, like so many other websites, ends up forming part of businesses microtargeting or behavioral and micro-segmented advertising, he says, which not only helps us find out what people like but also what we will want in the future.
“Until now, our information was something like grains of sand on the beach: it was not very useful. But “Now we are giving these data-gathering companies information that no longer resembles grains of sand on the beach, but seeds that make money.”
As to why Facebook has decided to change this slogan now (and without announcing it or giving explanations), the expert believes that It probably has to do with a change in a rule, a European directive approved in May that for the first time recognises that people pay with data.
In any case, even though Facebook’s slogan was previously “It’s free and always will be,” the platform’s Declaration of Rights and Responsibilities already warned of the opposite: “We do not guarantee that the platform will always be free,” as reported by the technology law blog. Terms and conditions.
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Tags: Trending, Social Networks, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg