Facebook

• 1. Introduction

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  Facebook launched on the 4th of February 2004 from a Harvard dorm room, and within two decades it would be used by more than three billion people every month. Mark Zuckerberg built it alongside roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The name came from something familiar on American college campuses: the face book directories handed to new students, paper booklets with photos and contact details. Zuckerberg had actually experimented a year earlier with a cruder site called Facemash, which let visitors rate students by appearance using photos scraped from campus directories. He was reported to university administrators and faced possible expulsion, but the charges were dropped. The leap from Facemash to TheFacebook was rapid. By the time the company moved to Palo Alto, California, in 2004, it had attracted Napster co-founder Sean Parker as president and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel as its first outside investor. What would drive this college experiment into something that reshaped global communication, and what would that reshaping cost?

• 2. From Campus to the World

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  Membership in the early months was limited to Harvard College, then spread to universities across the US and Canada before the company opened registration to anyone aged 13 or older in 2006. Two years earlier, in 2005, the company had paid to acquire the domain Facebook.com and dropped "the" from its name. By late 2007, Facebook had 100,000 pages on which companies promoted themselves, and Microsoft had purchased a 1.6 percent stake for $240 million, implying a total company value of around $15 billion. Growth accelerated. Facebook passed 100 million registered users in 2008. In July 2010 it crossed 500 million, with half of those members visiting daily for an average of 34 minutes, and 150 million accessing the site by mobile. The 2 billion user mark fell in June 2017. Facebook also became the most downloaded mobile application of the entire 2010s. In 2012, the company went public with one of the largest IPOs in tech history. That same year it acquired Instagram, and in 2014 it purchased WhatsApp and Oculus VR, stretching its reach from messaging into virtual reality. By the time reported figures placed monthly active users at approximately 3.07 billion, Facebook ranked as the third-most-visited website in the world, with 23 percent of its traffic originating from the United States.

• 3. The Architecture of Engagement

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  News Feed, the feature that places friends' updates and followed pages on every user's homepage, became central to how Facebook kept people returning. The feed attracted its own controversy almost immediately after launch: users complained it was cluttered and that it made personal activities too easy for others to track. Zuckerberg apologized and gave users more control over what appeared. On the 23rd of February 2010, Facebook was granted a patent on certain aspects of the News Feed, covering feeds in which links allow one user to participate in the activities of another. The Like button followed in February 2009, displayed as a thumbs-up icon; in February 2016, it expanded into five Reactions: Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry. A Care reaction was added in late April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Photo tagging, developed by Aaron Sittig and Scott Marlette in 2006 and granted a patent only in 2011, allowed users to label friends in images, triggering notifications and tying social connections to visual content. Facebook Messenger began as Facebook Chat in 2008 and became a standalone mobile app in August 2011. By April 2020, Messenger Rooms allowed video calls with up to 50 people simultaneously. On the 13th of January 2018, Facebook announced it would change the News Feed algorithm to prioritize posts from friends and family over media companies, a decision that had immediate consequences for publishers who had built audiences on the platform. In February 2020, Facebook pledged $1 billion to license news content from publishers over three years, in addition to the $600 million already paid since 2018 through deals with outlets including The Guardian and Financial Times.

• 4. The Data Economy

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  Facebook's revenue model depends on targeted advertising built from user data, a practice that reaches far beyond what users knowingly share. The company buys data from third-party sources gathered both online and offline to supplement its own records. It also constructs what researchers call "shadow profiles," collecting information about people who have never created a Facebook account through mechanisms such as the Like button embedded on third-party websites and the practice of users uploading their email contacts to find friends. A January 2024 study by Consumer Reports found that participants were monitored by more than two thousand companies on average. LiveRamp, a San Francisco-based data broker, was responsible for 96 percent of that tracking. In March 2024, California court documents detailed Facebook's 2016 "Project Ghostbusters," in which the company used its Onavo VPN tool to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks, intercepting and reading traffic that users sent to Snapchat, and later to YouTube and Amazon, before it was encrypted. After acquiring Onavo in 2013, Facebook had also used the VPN to monitor competitors' app usage, intelligence that motivated the WhatsApp acquisition in 2014. In 2016, Facebook Research launched Project Atlas, paying selected users between the ages of 13 and 35 up to $20 per month in exchange for their app usage, web browsing, location history, personal messages, photos, and emails. Apple temporarily revoked Facebook's Enterprise Developer Program certificates in January 2019 after TechCrunch reported on the project, disabling Facebook's internal iOS apps for one day.

• 5. Cambridge Analytica and Its Aftermath

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  Global Science Research sold data on more than 87 million Facebook users to Cambridge Analytica, a political data analysis firm led by Alexander Nix. Approximately 270,000 people had used a quiz app, but Facebook's API at the time allowed that app to harvest data from the users' friends without their knowledge. Facebook initially downplayed the breach before issuing an alarm and suspending Cambridge Analytica. On the 23rd of March 2018, England's High Court granted the Information Commissioner's Office a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica's London offices. Two days later, on the 25th of March, Zuckerberg published a personal apology in major newspapers across the United Kingdom and the United States, writing: "This was a breach of trust, and I'm sorry we didn't do more at the time." The Federal Trade Commission opened its own investigation the following day. On the 24th of July 2019, the FTC fined Facebook $5 billion, the largest penalty ever imposed on a company for violating consumer privacy. The settlement also required Facebook to operate under a 20-year privacy order and allowed the FTC to monitor compliance. Cambridge Analytica filed for bankruptcy. The violation of Facebook's existing consent decree with the FTC had theoretically carried a penalty of $40,000 per occurrence, which, applied across tens of millions of affected users, would have totalled trillions of dollars. Facebook also ended its partnerships with data brokers who helped advertisers target users and ultimately dropped its opposition to the California Consumer Privacy Act.

• 6. Disinformation and Political Manipulation

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  Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations in 2018 for interfering in U.S. electoral processes, including the 2016 presidential election. Facebook's chief security officer Alex Stamos had written that the company found approximately $100,000 in ad spending from June 2015 to May 2017, connected to about 470 inauthentic accounts and pages affiliated with Russia. The Clinton and Trump campaigns together spent $81 million on Facebook ads during the same period. Russian operatives used the platform to organize both Black Lives Matter rallies and anti-immigrant rallies on American soil, and to run ads exploiting divisions over race and religion by sending contrary messages to different users simultaneously. Former Facebook analyst Sophie Zhang, who worked on Spam and Fake Engagement, reported more than 25 political subversion operations she had uncovered and criticized the company's slow reaction and what she described as a laissez-faire internal culture. In the six-month period from October 2018 to March 2019, Facebook removed 3.39 billion fake accounts, a number exceeding the platform's reported count of 2.4 billion real users at the time. In Myanmar, Facebook took down 536 pages, 17 groups, 175 accounts, and 16 Instagram accounts linked to the Myanmar military, which collectively had been followed by more than 10 million people. The New York Times reported that more than 700,000 Rohingya had fled the country in a single year after anti-Rohingya propaganda spread across the platform, in what United Nations officials called a textbook example of ethnic cleansing. A UK parliamentary committee report called Facebook "digital gangsters" and warned that "democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalised dark adverts from unidentifiable sources."

• 7. Toward the Metaverse

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  In 2021, Facebook rebranded its parent company as Meta, signaling a shift in strategic focus toward virtual and augmented reality under the umbrella concept of the metaverse. The same year, the number of daily active users fell for the first time in a single quarter, dropping to 1.929 billion from 1.930 billion, though it recovered the following quarter. From 2017 to 2019, the percentage of Americans over age 12 who used Facebook declined from 67 percent to 61 percent, a drop of roughly 15 million U.S. users, with a steeper fall among younger Americans aged 12 to 34, whose usage rate dropped from 58 percent in 2015 to 29 percent in 2019. The rise of Instagram, also owned by Meta, coincided with that decline. In September 2024, Meta paid a $101 million fine for storing up to 600 million Facebook and Instagram passwords in plain text, a practice that investigators traced back to 2012 and that was first discovered in 2019. The site's characteristic blue color scheme, a detail rarely flagged in histories of major tech companies, traces to a personal circumstance: Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind, a fact he discovered after a test taken around 2007, and blue is the color he can most easily distinguish. The Hack programming language, announced on the 20th of March 2014 as an open-source project, had already been running across a large portion of Facebook before its public release, tested in production before the world knew it existed.