turned 20 on February 4, and its CEO
Mark Zuckerberg
celebrated the milestone by posting a few photos of him working on a computer
20 years
apart. He also posted a video that showed him in his younger years and changed his profile photo.
“Twenty years ago, I launched a thing. Along the way, lots of amazing people joined and we built some more awesome things.
We're still at it and the best is yet to come,” Zuckerberg posted on
, sharing snippets of his early days at Facebook.
On his post, the official Instagram handle of Facebook commented: “Love you dad.”
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Facebook launch in 2004 and its competition
Facebook was launched in 2004, and it competed with the likes of Yahoo, MySpace and Orkut to rapidly become one of the loved
social networking platforms
. In less than a year of its launch, Facebook had one million users and the company overtook its rival MySpace.
By 2012, Facebook surpassed one billion users a month and at the end of 2023, Facebook reported it had 2.11 billion daily users. Over these years, Facebook acquired several companies, including Instagram and WhatsApp.
Facebook went under a transition in October 2021, where Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will now be known as Meta – an umbrella company that will have Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other companies under it.
Meta’s family of apps, which includes Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, are now being used by 3.19 billion people daily in the fourth quarter, up from the 3.14 billion. The Family monthly active people figure was 3.98 billion as of December 31, 2023, an increase of six per cent year-over-year, as per news agency IANS.
Controversies surrounding Facebook
During its rise, the company was also mired into various controversies, including the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2014, where Facebook paid $725 million to settle legal action due to a significant data breach.
In 2022, Facebook also paid a fine of 265 million euros for allowing personal data to be extracted from the site. Last year, the company was fined a record 1.2 billion euros by the Irish Data Protection Commission, for transferring European users' data outside of the jurisdiction.
English (US) ·