Facebook started with two students each putting in 1,000 dollars
In January 2004 a Harvard sophomore coded a site he called TheFacebook, and he and classmate Eduardo Saverin agreed to invest 1,000 dollars apiece. It went live on 4 February. By December 2023 the service reported about 3.07 billion monthly users, roughly two in five people on the planet.
The name came from the printed face books American colleges gave students, directories of photos and basic details. Mark Zuckerberg had toyed with the idea before. At Phillips Exeter he knew Kris Tillery, who built a digital student directory from school records. At Harvard in 2003 Zuckerberg made Facemash, a site inviting users to rate which of two students was more attractive, and was nearly expelled before the charges were dropped.
TheFacebook was first open only to Harvard students. Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes helped run it as it spread to campuses across North America. That same year Sean Parker, who had co-founded Napster, took over as president, the company moved to Palo Alto, and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel made the first investment. From 2006 anyone aged 13 or over with an email address could join, with 14 the minimum in South Korea, Spain and Quebec. The News Feed arrived, and by late 2007 Facebook had overtaken MySpace to become the world's most popular social network.
The basics have stayed recognisable. Users build profiles, share posts and media with the public or with mutually agreed friends, join interest groups, trade on Marketplace and chat through Messenger. It was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s, and in July 2025 ranked as the third most visited website, with 23 percent of traffic coming from the United States. In 2021 the parent company renamed itself Meta.
Criticism has grown with scale. The 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed user data being misused to influence elections, bringing fines and hearings, and the platform has been accused of enabling political manipulation around the 2016 US election, mass surveillance, fake news, conspiracy theories and hate speech. Critics also point to addiction and damaged self-esteem, and to claims the company inflated user numbers for advertisers.
Source: Facebook
