Nowadays, social networking sites have become very popular and provide more

convenient lifestyle to the people. It has modernized the way people connect, interact

and socialize with each other (Drago, 2015). Due to the proliferation of social

websites and applications, social networking sites has become an indispensable part

of life with the increase in complexities of contemporary times. In addition, the vast

array of social networking platforms offers end users with the possibility to enable

their communication through text, video and audio streams (Parveen, 2012).

With the development of new communication technologies, Facebook became one of

the most popular social network sites all around the world at the beginning of the 21st

century. It was founded in 2004 under the name ‘The Facebook’ by Mark Zuckerberg

and his friends, Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saver from Harvard University

(Grimmelmann, 2008). In a very short time, more than half of the students studying at

Harvard University became members of Facebook. A total number of 450 people and

approximately 22,000 photographs and visuals were uploaded. The aim was to

introduce Facebook and its functions to the students at Harvard University. Two

months following its establishment, Facebook was used by the schools around Boston

and all Ivy League schools. Within two years, all schools in the United States began

to use Facebook. With increasing usage among schools, Facebook reached 1 million

users by December 2004 (Heidemann et al., 2012).

Today, Facebook has approximately 901 million users (Sevük, 2013). It has been

widely used by people of different ages to meet numerous needs such as socialization

and entertainment. Some young adults who are university students use Facebook for
their communication needs. It has become an inevitable part of young adults’ lives

(Parveen, Jaafar, & Ainin, 2015).

Malaysia is no different from other parts of the world. The growth of social

networking sites (SNSs) is rising among young adults. According to a research done

by Subramanian (2017), the most common social networking sites in Malaysia are

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, 2go, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn. Facebook users in

Malaysia have remained on the increase since 2016 (Subramanian, 2017). The

statistics of Facebook users in Malaysia was shown by recent research carried out by

Abdulahi et al., (2014). According to his findings, there were 23.2 million Facebook

users in Malaysia as of September 2018, which accounted for 71% of the entire

population in Malaysia. Ages of 25 to 34 were the largest user group (8,300,000)

(Abdulahi et al., 2014). This of course gives a clue to the level of patronage young

adults in Malaysia have on Facebook.

According to Subramanian (2017), Facebook certainly affects how people engage

with one another across all venues and ages and has a great impact on the

interpersonal communication of young adults as they spend more time

communicating with their peers on Facebook than physically.