Facebook is the social network that connected the world, for better and worse. Founded by Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard dorm room in 2004, it grew from a college networking site into the world’s most-used social platform, with over 3 billion monthly active users. The parent company rebranded to Meta Platforms in October 2021, signaling a strategic bet on the metaverse, but the social network itself is still called Facebook.
Meta reported $135 billion in revenue for 2023, almost entirely from advertising. The company’s family of apps — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads — reaches roughly 3.9 billion people monthly, making it the largest social media entity on the planet. Instagram alone has over 2 billion monthly active users, and WhatsApp is the dominant messaging app in most of the world outside the US and China.
Facebook’s impact on society has been enormous and deeply contested. The platform has enabled small businesses to reach customers, helped organize social movements, and connected people across borders. But it’s also faced intense scrutiny over misinformation, political manipulation, mental health effects (especially on teens), data privacy scandals (Cambridge Analytica), and its role in enabling violence in places like Myanmar.
On the technology side, Meta has been a massive contributor to open source. React, PyTorch, and Llama (their large language model) are all Meta projects that have shaped the tech industry. The company’s AI research lab (FAIR) has published foundational work in machine learning.
Meta’s pivot to metaverse development has cost tens of billions through Reality Labs, though the company has also emerged as a leader in open-source AI with its Llama models. The stock recovered from its 2022 lows after cost-cutting measures and strong advertising revenue, pushing Meta’s market cap well above $1 trillion.
