1. In 2013, a whitehat hacker tried to report a security bug to Facebook. When no one responded, he hacked Mark Zuckerberg's account and posted the bug on his wall.
2. In 2014, Facebook faced criticism for conducting psychological tests on 70,000 unconsenting participants in 2012, removing certain words from users' newsfeeds to test how that affected their reactions to posts.
3. The company faced heavy criticisms for misinformation surrounding the 2016 US Presidential election, especially after a Buzzfeed report showed that false news stories outperformed real news. Mark Zuckerberg posted to Facebook an apology and said the company plans to improve.
4. Then came 2018, when news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke and revealed that the data-analytics firm improperly harvested data from tens of millions of Facebook users for ad targeting during the 2016 election.
5. 2018 also marked one of the darkest moments in Facebook's history, as reports revealed that the social network was used to incite genocide against the Muslim Rohingya minority in Myanmar by the country's military officials.
6. In 2019, the FTC fined Facebook $5 billion over violations of user privacy, which was a record-breaking fine for a tech company.
7. Facebook also announced its plans to launch a cryptocurrency called Libra, and in October of that year, Zuckerberg once again testified before a committee of the House of Representatives on financial impacts and regulations about the cryptocurrency.
8. In November 2019, over 4,000 pages of internal Facebook documents were released from a lawsuit by an app developer. The documents revealed how the company cut off developer access to data, planned to track locations of Android users, and considered charging developers for access to user data, among other things.
9. That same month, BuzzFeed and Bloomberg reported that Facebook spent the second half of 2016 trying to buy TikTok's predecessor, Musical.ly. The company's interest in the China-based app drew scrutiny in light of Mark Zuckerberg's recent criticisms of the Chinese app.
10. Facebook announces in January 2020 that it wouldn't fact-check politicians' ads on its platforms, allowing them to publish posts that could contain misinformation. It didn't bode well as the election loomed.
11. Zuckerberg says he won't remove then-President Trump's post reading "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" as the company embraces its policy of exempting noteworthy figures from content rules. The move prompts Facebook advertisers to boycott.
12. Zuckerberg appears in a blockbuster congressional antitrust hearing in July 2020 alongside the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet's Google. Lawmakers later conclude that all four companies are monopolies and should be regulated.
13. A Facebook data scientist-turned whistleblower, Sophie Zhang, comes forward in September 2020 accusing the company of failing to stop political manipulation by foreign governments.
14. Rioters part of the US Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, are found to have organized on Facebook ahead of the event, as well as on other platforms. Zuckerberg and Google and Twitter's CEOs would later testify in front of Congress about misinformation in March.
15. Facebook's Oversight Board criticizes the company in May 2021 for avoiding its responsibilities in Trump's suspension and issuing an "arbitrary penalty."
16. In what may be its worst PR nightmare since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a former Facebook employee-turned whistleblower shares internal documents with The Wall Street Journal in September 2021.