Facebook launches, accelerating the social media era
- Date
- 4 February 2004
- Category
- Social & demographic
- Region
- United States
- Era
- Contemporary
- Significance
On 4 February 2004 Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg, with roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, launched 'Thefacebook', a social networking website initially restricted to Harvard students. Over a thousand people registered within a day.
The service spread rapidly to other universities, then to the wider public, and was renamed Facebook in 2005. Built around real identities, personal profiles, friend connections and a constantly updated news feed, it became the template for mass-market social media and grew into one of the largest communications platforms in history, eventually serving billions of users worldwide alongside acquisitions such as Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook helped move much of human social life, news consumption and political organising online, and built a vast advertising business based on detailed user data. Its dominance also generated lasting controversy over privacy, misinformation, mental health, content moderation and the platform's influence on elections and public discourse, making it a central and contested institution of the digital age.
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Further reading
The wider story
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Global best-seller on how our species, its populations and societies remade the world.
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