Short answers, pulled from the story.
Facebook was founded on the 4th of February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, along with his Harvard College roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The service was initially limited to Harvard students before expanding to other universities and, by 2006, to anyone aged 13 or older.
Facebook reported approximately 3.07 billion monthly active users worldwide. It ranks as the third-most-visited website in the world, with 23 percent of its traffic originating from the United States.
Global Science Research sold data on more than 87 million Facebook users to Cambridge Analytica, a political data analysis firm led by Alexander Nix, using a quiz app that exploited Facebook's API to harvest data from users' friends without their knowledge. The scandal resulted in a $5 billion FTC fine against Facebook in July 2019, the largest privacy penalty ever imposed on a company at that time.
Facebook's primary color is blue because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind. Blue is the color he can most clearly distinguish, a realization that came after a test taken around 2007.
After acquiring Onavo in 2013, Facebook used the Onavo Protect VPN app to monitor users' web traffic and app usage, tracking competitors' performance. Internal documents released in 2024 revealed Facebook had also used Onavo to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks on Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon traffic as part of a project called Project Ghostbusters. Apple removed the app from its store in August 2018 for violating guidelines.
Facebook was used by Myanmar's military to spread anti-Rohingya propaganda. The company eventually took down 536 pages, 17 groups, 175 accounts, and 16 Instagram accounts linked to the military, which had collectively been followed by more than 10 million people. More than 700,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar in a single year during the period the content spread, in what United Nations officials described as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.