But now Facebook's 1.39 billion users span a range of ages, ethnicities, religions, gender identities, and nationalities, and Facebook's ability to create a space that meets everyone's definition of "safe" increasingly has been called into question.

Which is why today, Facebook updated its community guidelines, spelling out in unprecedented detail what constitutes unacceptable behavior. Yet the unwieldy specificity of the new guidelines only proves that Facebook's policies and procedures surrounding user activity will never be a finished product. As the world's largest social network, Facebook certainly can learn a lot from the past, but it can never fully anticipate the future.