Meta Platforms Inc. is a $1.5T conglomerate operating a suite of apps and digital services used by billions that include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook’s standalone Messenger app.
Founded and majority-controlled by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, Meta—whose earliest iteration was dubbed The Facebook—has pioneered and shaped the popular uses of social media and its monetization for about two decades, ranking as one of the highest-valued companies in the world.
Origins
Meta’s story—immortalized in the 2010 movie "The Social Network"—began in 2004 when then-Harvard sophomore Zuckerberg, his roommates, and a friend launched Facebook as a platform to connect student profiles at the university.
Demand exploded on campus, so the founders opened up Facebook to other colleges and then the general public in 2006.
That year, Facebook launched the News Feed, a major innovation offering each user a constant stream of updates about everyone in their network. The feed—one of the earliest algorithm-based curation approaches—boosted the app’s growth exponentially.
After it went public in 2012, Facebook surpassed 1 billion users—around 14% of the world’s population.
Expansion
In 2009, Facebook again transformed social media by deploying the “Like” button, a simple way for users to signal their interest in content. Facebook would then tailor its algorithm—as well as its ads—to each user’s preferences, eventually capturing data on an expanding set of user behaviors.
Unlike traditional advertising that targets broad demographics, Facebook could sell ads targeted to categories of users based on things like location and stated preferences, offering advertisers unprecedented precision. This revolutionized the digital ad market and caused marketers to steer so much of their budgets to Facebook that advertising is now the parent company’s main source of revenue (approximately 98% of its $134B revenue in 2023 was derived from ads).
After going public in 2012, the company made several major acquisitions, including Instagram (2012), WhatsApp (2014), and VR headset manufacturer Oculus (2014). Owning Instagram helped Facebook lead the mobile photo-sharing market, while WhatsApp aligned with Facebook’s goal of owning a dominant messaging app. Buying a VR platform was a bet on the future of virtual reality’s role in social media as well as the hardware potentially necessary to access it.
Facebook’s fortunes are partly tied to Apple and Google, the companies whose App Stores distribute Facebook. On its Quest-branded VR headsets, however, Meta controls the entire hardware and software stack.
Meta-morphosis
Facebook rebranded to Meta in October 2021 since the company’s ecosystem now included much more than the main Facebook app. However, even though the company has matured, challenges and controversies continue to plague it.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal from 2018 saw millions of users’ data harvested for microtargeted political ads, forcing the company to pay a $725M settlement. Facebook has also been criticized for hate speech and misinformation on the platform, which has led to real-world unrest in countries like Myanmar. All social networks have struggled with the proliferation of that kind of content, but it is Facebook’s scale that magnifies the potential harm.
The so-called “Facebook Papers,” internal documents disclosed by a company whistleblower in 2021, also revealed that company executives were aware of potential harms (such as Facebook’s effect on teens’ mental health) but prioritized profits over safety.
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In 2018, the UN alleged Facebook may have played a role in inciting violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar. Around the same time, studies connected social media to rising hate crimes in other regions. But is social media truly to blame? The answer is more complex.
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The Vox Media podcast series "Land of the Giants" explores the impact of some of the biggest technology companies on society, focusing on a different tech giant each season and exploring how they’ve influenced the world. This season from 2022 focuses on Facebook and Meta, and listeners will learn how the company has not only shaped the lives of its millions of users but also what the future has in store for the company.
Facebook parent company Meta is commonly thought of as a software company, but many people might not realize that the parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp also has a growing hardware business. This video offers a comprehensive review of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses that feature the capabilities of a smartphone — albeit one the user wears on their face.
As Facebook’s user base has aged, it’s increasingly struggled with the perception that it’s no longer cool or relevant among younger internet users — especially with the rise of upstart social networks like TikTok. This article from Reuters explains the steps Facebook is taking to reverse that trend and win back younger users, by launching new video features and other tools to keep pace with the company’s rivals.
Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg is one of the few remaining tech founder CEOs who’s still running the company he launched. Since starting Facebook in 2004, both his company as well as the tech industry at large have changed in profound ways — and in this hour-long September 2024 podcast interview with Zuckerberg, he dives into it all. The interview includes stories from Zuckerberg from Facebook’s early history, his thoughts on AI and VR, plus much more.
Technology companies like Meta are investing millions of dollars into new AI-based tools and features, capitalizing on an explosion of interest in next-generation machine learning and computer vision technologies. This Bloomberg video summarizes one such tool from Meta — its new AI video generator that can create or edit videos based on a simple text prompt, putting Facebook’s parent company into direct competition with rivals like Google and OpenAI.
Facebook has been accused for years of taking a too-light approach to content moderation. While it’s made strides in recent years, problematic content continues to thrive on the company’s platforms — as revealed in this article from Wired, which takes a closer look at how extremist groups are actively using Facebook to recruit members, coordinate training, and more.
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