I feel like the major change was who started using Facebook: people who had never "interneted" before. When it first launched and was limited to .edu emails everyone on the platform had grown up online. Before we had Facebook we said and shared a whole lot of dumb stuff anonymously and figured out the real-world consequences of our online actions. We "trolled" a wikipedia article about elephants with John Stewart and learned about "fake news" from Bonsai Kittens and pop-up ads promising we'd just become millionares. We "socialized" on AIM, LiveJournal, Xanaga and MySpace. For early Facebook users, Facebook was just one of many destinations on the internet.
But for most of today's Facebook users Facebook is the internet and they missed out on their internet training wheels. Facebook has merely replaced AOL for a generation of people who will now take any "article" their friend posted at face value, share it with all of their friends, and then angrily complain about "mainstream media" when their phone blows up in the microwave instead of charging like the "news" told them it would.
Sorry if I was unclear as I was trying not to malign baby boomers but I was referring to the 50+/not tech savvy crowd on Facebook, not the young internet users of today.
Please be careful with the "50+" comments, ha! Not there yet but closer than I'd like to admit, and I grew up during the sweet spot of modern computing. My biased opinion is that Gen X had it best in this regard.
But for most of today's Facebook users Facebook is the internet and they missed out on their internet training wheels. Facebook has merely replaced AOL for a generation of people who will now take any "article" their friend posted at face value, share it with all of their friends, and then angrily complain about "mainstream media" when their phone blows up in the microwave instead of charging like the "news" told them it would.