Facebook is rebranding. The social media behemoth will continue under the Meta Platforms Inc. umbrella. There are hundreds of explainers to let you know Facebook’s future. It’s time to focus on Facebook’s past.

What was the original intent of Facebook? Actually, what was Facebook before Facebook?

Facebook was once FaceMash. FaceMash was a localized, female only, Harvard student body version of Hot or Not. Hot or Not was a popular (the Internet was a little different in the early 00s) destination for people to judge a stranger’s hotness. That’s it. All of this is based on Hot or Not. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are all based on Hot or Not. Feel free to lump Instagram into this since Facebook/Meta owns Instagram.

All of social media is founded on the idea of whether or not someone is hot or not. All of it.

This is not new information. It’s part of Facebook’s origin story. It’s in the 2010 film The Social Network. It’s the first act of the film. Director David Fincher does an excellent job showcasing how an angry young man uses his powers to take someone else’s idea and ranks fellow students. Unlike participants on Hot or Not, no one chose to be on FaceMash. Zuckerburg lifted the photos from campus facebook directories. Though it may seem like a stretch, one could make a case that the popularity of that initial page is what led us to The Facebook Papers.

The film was not an underground film. It won Academy Awards. It made over $200 million dollars. It has been seen by a large swath of people (If you haven’t seen it, watch it, it’s currently free on Tubi). No one is running away from how Facebook started as a Hot or Not clone. No one has to because it’s forgotten.

You shouldn’t forget where you came from.

Facebook has every right to rebrand. They can and will do whatever they want in perpetuity due to the myth that anything is too big to fail. Call it Meta, Facebook, The Facebook or FaceMash, beneath it all is Hot or Not.

Facebook does a lot of good in addition to a lot of bad. When the platform went down for a few hours earlier this month, their impact on small businesses around the world was felt. Thousands, if not millions, of businesses use and depend on Facebook products. They’ve become integral in connecting people, for better or worse. It’s beautiful and frightening. Though folks like me do not trust it or any other social media platform, it still has a favorable view amont most users . It’s not my role to let you know if something is good or bad. I’m just here to remind you it all started as Hot or Not imitation.

It seems like no one remembers FaceMash. It may not appear important in 2021 that a site built in 2003 was founded on someone else’s idea, used other people’s intellectual property without consent and pitted strangers against each other in a superficial beauty contest that thrived on spite. Maybe it’s not important.

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