Facebook

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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

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Facebook, American online social media platform and social network service that is part of the company Meta Platforms. Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, all of whom were students at Harvard University. Facebook became the largest social network in the world, with nearly three billion users as of 2021, and about half that number were using Facebook every day. The company’s headquarters are in Menlo Park, California.

Access to Facebook is free of charge, and the company earns most of its money from advertisements on the website. New users can create profiles, upload photos, join preexisting groups, and start new groups. Facebook’s timeline functions as a space on each user’s profile page where users can post individual content and friends can post messages; the status feature enables users to alert friends to their current location or situation; and users’ newsfeeds inform them of changes to their friends’ profiles and status and typically feature news stories, general articles, and assorted media. Users can also chat with each other via private messages using Facebook Messenger, which also functions as a standalone app. To signal their approval of content on Facebook, users can use the “like” button, which was expanded to include other “reacts,” such as an “angry” or “sad” react.

Facebook’s appeal stemmed in part from cofounder Zuckerberg’s insistence from the very beginning that members be transparent about who they are; users are forbidden from adopting false identities. The company’s management argued that transparency is necessary for forming personal relationships, sharing ideas and information, and building up society as a whole. It also noted that the bottom-up, peer-to-peer connectivity among Facebook users makes it easier for businesses to connect their products with consumers.

Facebook began at Harvard University in 2003 as Facemash, an online service for students to judge the attractiveness of female Harvard students. Because the primary developer, Zuckerberg, violated university policy in acquiring photographs of students from sorority house websites for the service, it was shut down after two days. Despite its brief tenure, 450 people (who voted 22,000 times) flocked to Facemash. That success prompted Zuckerberg to register the URL http://www.thefacebook.com in January 2004. He then created a new social network at that address with fellow students Saverin, Moskovitz, and Hughes.

The social network TheFacebook.com launched in February 2004. Harvard students who signed up for the service could post photographs of themselves and personal information about their lives, such as their class schedules and clubs they belonged to. Its popularity increased, and soon students from other prestigious schools, such as Yale and Stanford universities, were allowed to join. By June 2004 more than 250,000 students from 34 schools had signed up, and that same year major corporations such as the credit card company MasterCard started paying for exposure on the site.

In September 2004 TheFacebook added the “Wall” to a member’s online profile. This widely used feature let a user’s friends post information on their Wall and became a key element in the social aspect of the network. By the end of 2004, TheFacebook had reached one million active users. However, the company still trailed the then-leading online social network, Myspace, which boasted five million members.

The year 2005 proved to be pivotal for the company. It became simply Facebook and introduced the idea of “tagging” people in photos that were posted to the site. With tags, people identified themselves and others in images that could be seen by other Facebook friends. Facebook allowed users to upload an unlimited number of photos. In 2005 high-school students and students at universities outside the United States were allowed to join the service. By year’s end it had six million monthly active users.

In 2006 Facebook opened its membership beyond students to anyone over the age of 13. As Zuckerberg had predicted, advertisers were able to create new and effective customer relationships. For example, that year, household product manufacturer Procter & Gamble attracted 14,000 people to a promotional effort by “expressing affinity” with a teeth-whitening product. This kind of direct consumer engagement on such a large scale had not been possible before Facebook, and more companies began using the social network for marketing and advertising.

In 2008 Facebook surpassed Myspace as the most-visited social media website. With the introduction of Live Feed, the company also took a competitive swing at the growing popularity of Twitter, a social network that runs a live feed of news service-like posts from members whom a user follows. Similar to Twitter’s ongoing stream of user posts, Live Feed pushed posts from friends automatically to a member’s homepage. (Live Feed has since been incorporated into News Feed.)

Facebook encourages third-party software developers to use the service. In 2006 it released its application programming interface (API) so that programmers could write software that Facebook members could use directly through the service. By 2009 developers generated about $500 million in revenue for themselves through Facebook. The company also earns revenues from developers through payments for virtual or digital products sold through third-party applications. By 2011 payments from one such company, Zynga Inc., an online game developer, accounted for 12 percent of the company’s revenues.

In February 2012 Facebook filed to become a public company. Its initial public offering (IPO) in May raised $16 billion, giving it a market value of $102.4 billion. By contrast, the largest IPO of an Internet company to date was that of the search-engine company Google Inc., which had raised $1.9 billion when it went public in 2004. By the end of the first day of the stock’s trading, Zuckerberg’s holdings were estimated at more than $19 billion.

Facebook has become a powerful tool for political movements, beginning with the U.S. presidential election of 2008, when more than 1,000 Facebook groups were formed in support of either Democratic candidate Barack Obama or Republican candidate John McCain. In Colombia the service was used to rally hundreds of thousands in protests against the antigovernment FARC guerrilla rebellion. In Egypt, activists protesting the government of Pres. Hosni Mubarak during the uprising of 2011 often organized themselves by forming groups on Facebook.

In 2018 a whistleblower exposed how Facebook user data had been shared without user consent with the U.K.-based firm Cambridge Analytica. This information was subsequently used in an effort to influence election outcomes worldwide. That same year the Facebook algorithm reduced the prevalence of journalistic posts and boosted content from friends and family, which led to an increase in hate speech and conspiracy theories.

Also in 2018 another whistleblower turned over tens of thousands of internal company documents showing that Facebook had given certain celebrities “VIP” status, enabling them to post harmful content without repercussions, and had known about Instagram’s negative impact on teenage mental health, especially in exacerbating body dissatisfaction and eating disorders and stoking the desire for cosmetic surgery.

After former Pres. Donald Trump’s 2016 election win, Facebook was blamed for promoting the political misinformation that had led to his victory. Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be thoroughly fact-checking its posts in the future, stating in a public post that Facebook planned to “take notes” from reputable fact-checking organizations.

The presence of hate speech centering on the murder of George Floyd, misinformation about COVID-19, and conspiracies about the 2020 U.S. presidential election on Facebook triggered employees to continue to challenge company policies, but Facebook still faced little consequence from lawmakers. Zuckerberg himself, though initially apologetic, began to shift the way he approached Facebook’s fact-checking policies. He criticized Pres. Joe Biden’s administration’s push to “censor” information related to COVID-19.

A 2022 Amnesty International report showed that Facebook had promoted articles and content that had led to the deadly genocide of the Rohyingya people, a tragedy that occurred in Myanmar in 2017. Such evidence showed the prevalence of real-world violence caused by amplification of hate speech on social media. According to the official Amnesty site, Meta was allegedly “profiting from the echo chamber of hatred created by its hate-spiraling algorithms.”

Such controversies hurt Facebook’s reputation and garnered criticism about “big tech” and the lack of government regulation of the company. At the same time, Zuckerberg became enthusiastic about the idea of a metaverse in which users would create avatars and attend virtual events. He emphasized elements of privacy and safety, addressing widespread lack of trust in Facebook. In October 2021 Facebook announced that it was changing the name of its parent platform to Meta Platforms.

However, as of October 2022, Meta had incurred $13.7 billion in total losses that year on metaverse development. It also saw low user engagement and quality issues with its metaverse applications. In a February 2023 Facebook post, Zuckerberg announced that the company was pivoting away from the metaverse to focus on generative artificial intelligence to build “creative and expressive tools,” with the metaverse being deemed relevant for a smaller, targeted audience, such as video game players.

In December 2024, following the 2024 U.S. presidential election, which saw Trump winning the presidency, Meta made a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund. In January 2025 Zuckerberg announced that the fact-checking programs used on Facebook in the past decade would be removed in a bid for the company to “get back to its roots around free expression.” Zuckerberg and other prominent Silicon Valley CEOs attended Trump’s inauguration ceremony on January 20, 2025.

David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (2010), is a well-researched history of Facebook and the competition it faced in rising to the top of the social network services market. Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal (2009), is a gossipy story told largely from the perspective of Eduardo Saverin, a Facebook cofounder who left the company and subsequently filed lawsuits against it; the book was the basis for the film The Social Network (2010).