Another 12 months have flown by. As we look back at this year in tech, The Verge staff members are grading each major company and product category in the industry on how they fared in 2016.
Last year, with its profits surging and user base surpassing 1 billion, Facebook entered its imperial phase. The company launched internet.org, an ambitious effort to bring all of the world’s people online, and built prototypes of a solar-powered drone that would help it do so. And growth continued into this year, with 1.18 billion daily users and profits that tripled in the most recent quarter.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg, announced an even more ambitious goal for himself: curing all human disease. Meanwhile Aquila, its internet drone, got in the air for the first time. The company’s subsidiaries all made progress, to varying degrees: Oculus, its virtual-reality arm, hit store shelves. Instagram doubled its user base over a two-year period, aided by its decision to strip-mine the most successful parts of Snapchat and insert them into the app. WhatsApp hit 1 billion users and outlined a plan to eventually make money by connecting users with businesses.
So why does it feel, at the end of December, like Facebook had a lousy year?
So why does it feel, at the end of December, like Facebook had a lousy year? In short: the US presidential election. The election of Donald Trump drew intense scrutiny around Facebook’s role in the public sphere, after dozens of hoaxes and misinformation campaigns went viral on the platform. “Fake news” — the two words which have come to define Facebook’s 2016 — found a welcome home on Facebook, and likely energized some unknown quantity of Trump voters while diminishing support for Hillary Clinton.