Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2010.
Zuckerberg received the prestigious title thanks to Facebook’s enormous influence on the web and on society, with half a billion members on the biggest social network in the world.
“Facebook has merged with the social fabric of American life, and not just American but human life: nearly half of all Americans have a Facebook account, but 70pc of Facebook users live outside the US. It’s a permanent fact of our global social reality,” said the Time article.
“We have entered the Facebook age, and Mark Zuckerberg is the man who brought us here.”
Among the runners-up was Julian Assange, controversial editor-in-chief of whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks.
Many readers have commented on the article disagreeing with Zuckerberg’s win, with some claiming that Assange should have been given the title, after he won a reader’s poll for who they thought would be Person of the Year prior to the reveal that Mark Zuckerberg won.
According to Time, it was Zuckerberg’s work on Facebook which changed how people connect online that clenched the title.
“For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them (something that has never been done before); for creating a new system of exchanging information that has become both indispensable and sometimes a little scary; and finally, for changing how we all live our lives in ways that are innovative and even optimistic, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is Time’s 2010 Person of the Year,” Time said.
