Short answers, pulled from the story.
Facebook was founded on the 4th of February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg along with four roommates: Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The platform initially launched as TheFacebook exclusively for Harvard students before expanding to other universities.
In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that the personal data of over 87 million users had been harvested without their consent and sold to a political data firm. The Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion, the largest penalty ever imposed on a company for violating consumer privacy, and forced the company to implement a new privacy structure under a 20-year settlement order.
The News Feed was introduced on the 24th of September 2006 and fundamentally altered how users interact with the platform by automatically aggregating posts, photos, and events into a single scrolling timeline. This feature transformed Facebook from a static directory into a dynamic stream of information that kept users logged in for an average of 34 minutes daily by 2010.
In 2016, Russian operatives used the platform to interfere with the United States presidential election by spending over $100,000 on ads to polarize the American public and organize rallies for and against Donald Trump. The company's algorithms designed to maximize engagement inadvertently amplified divisive content and allowed coordinated inauthentic behavior to thrive.
Facebook rebranded as Meta Platforms in 2021 to reflect a strategic shift toward building the metaverse and focusing on virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. This rebranding marked a departure from the company's original identity as a social networking service and signaled a new era of digital interaction.