Facebook is an American social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. Users create a profile, post text, photos and video, and send messages to other users. Mark Zuckerberg founded the service in 2004 with his Harvard College roommates. It is one of the most visited websites in the world.
History of Facebook
Creator: Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Year: 2004.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004. It is a social network. He did it with roommates. They were at Harvard College. Fellow students helped him. They were Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The name comes from face book directories. Students at American universities get them. The directories hold photos. They also hold personal details.
In January 2004, Zuckerberg coded a new site. It was called TheFacebook. At first, only Harvard students could use it. Then it spread. It reached other universities in North America. It grew from a campus directory. It became a social network. Anyone could join.
Since 2006, it has let people register. People aged 13 and older may join. The exception is South Korea, Spain and Quebec. There the minimum age is 14. It also added the News Feed. The News Feed became central. Users spent time on it. By late 2007 it had 100,000 pages. Companies used those pages to sell products.
It has faced criticism over privacy. One case is the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Critics also linked it to political manipulation. The 2016 United States elections were part of this. They also linked it to mass surveillance. Some named addiction, fake news and hate speech.
As of December 2023, it said about 3.07 billion monthly active users. Monthly active users (MAU) are people who log in during a month. As of July 2025, it ranked as the third most visited website.1 23 percent of its traffic came from the United States.
Changelog and latest update
On October 11, 2017, it added 3D Posts. They let users upload interactive 3D assets. On January 11, 2018, the company said it would change the News Feed. It would show more content from friends and family. It would show less from media companies.
Messenger began as Facebook Chat in 2008. It became a standalone app for mobile phones in August 2011. In April 2020, it began to roll out Messenger Rooms. It is a video chat feature. It works for up to 50 people at a time. In July 2020, Messenger added Face ID and Touch ID sign-in for iOS users.
Its security history includes a bug bounty program. It started on July 29, 2011. It paid security researchers at least $500 per report. Each report described a security hole. In October 2012, it passed one billion monthly active users. It passed two billion in June 2017.
In 2019, the United States Federal Trade Commission fined it $5 billion. The fine followed an investigation into its privacy practices. In May 2020, the company agreed to a preliminary settlement of $52 million. The settlement was with United States content moderators. They suffered psychological trauma on the job. The parent company was known as Facebook, Inc. It later took the name Meta Platforms.
Latest update: Community notes replace fact-checking, 2025-01-07
On January 7, 2025, Meta said it would end third-party fact-checking in the United States and move to Community Notes. This applies to Facebook and Instagram. Steven Brill is a co-founder of NewsGuard. NewsGuard is a news rating company. Brill criticized the decision.
Usage examples
Facebook pages and posts have web addresses. Sites can link to them. Sites also add share links, Open Graph tags and embeds. Open Graph tags are meta elements. They control the title, type and picture shown when a page link is shared. The examples below show each part.
const s = "https://www.facebook.com/"
+ "sharer/sharer.php?u="
+ encodeURIComponent(location.href);This code builds a Facebook share address for the current page. The encodeURIComponent function converts the page address into a safe form for the u parameter. A button can open the result in a new window so a visitor can share the page.
<meta property="og:title"
content="Web Hosting Basics">
<meta property="og:type"
content="article">
<meta property="og:url"
content="https://example.com/page">These meta tags give Facebook the title, the content type and the address of the page. Facebook reads them when someone shares the page. Without them, Facebook guesses the title and the picture from the page text. The tags belong in the head section of the page, where the browser reads page information first.
<div class="fb-post"
data-href="https://www.facebook.com/
PAGE/posts/POST_ID"
data-width="500"></div>
<script async defer
crossorigin="anonymous"
src="https://connect.facebook.net/
en_US/sdk.js"></script>This embed shows a public Facebook post inside a web page. The script loads the Facebook SDK, a software kit that draws the post. The data-href value must be the address of a public post, and data-width sets the width in pixels.
References
These sources are outside Websnoogie and were checked on 2026-10-12.
Facebook
Wikipedia
Encyclopedia entry on the social network. It covers the 2004 founding, the minimum age rules, the user counts, the news feed and messaging history, the privacy criticism and the ownership by Meta Platforms, with a list of sources.
Meta Newsroom
Meta
The official newsroom for Meta and its apps, including Facebook. It publishes company announcements, product changes and policy statements. Readers can search it for the latest Facebook news from the company. Meta uses the page for company announcements about its apps.
About Meta
Meta
The company page for Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook. It explains the mission, the apps and the products that the company operates, and it links to the newsroom and the company's policy pages.
Facebook Help Center
Meta
The official help center for Facebook accounts, pages, privacy settings and reporting tools. Site owners can use it to learn how the service handles public posts and shared links.
Sharing, Meta for Developers
Meta
The developer documentation for sharing from a website to Facebook. It describes the share dialog, the Open Graph tags and the requirements that a site must meet to offer the share feature.
Your link preview is the first thing Facebook shows
Owners often ask why a link to their site looks plain on Facebook. The cause is usually a missing or wrong tag in the page code. Facebook reads the title, the description and the image behind each link. When those tags are blank, Facebook guesses. The guess is rarely a good match for your business.
We set those tags on every page we build. We write a clear title and a short description that match what the page says. We choose an image size that Facebook displays well. We test each tag in Facebook's own sharing preview before launch.
We have spent over twenty years in web design, and that experience shapes each build. A typical site is ready in three to five days. WordPress hosting runs $149 a year. A new site is $300 one time, for up to five pages plus a contact page.
Share the link you post most, and we will show you the preview it creates. Call 402-813-4034 before 10 pm, any day of the week.
