Why Facebook was created
Facebook, American online social network service that is part of the company Meta Platforms. Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, all of whom were students at Harvard University. Facebook became the largest social network in the world, with nearly three billion users as of 2021, and about half that number were using Facebook every day. The company’s headquarters are in Menlo Park, California.
Access to Facebook is free of charge, and the company earns most of its money from advertisements on the website. New users can create profiles, upload photos, join a preexisting group, and start new groups. The site has many components, including Timeline, a space on each user’s profile page where users can post their content and friends can post messages; Status, which enables users to alert friends to their current location or situation; and News Feed, which informs users of changes to their friends’ profiles and status. Users can chat with each other and send each other private messages. Users can signal their approval of content on Facebook with the Like button, a feature that also appears on many other websites. Other services that are part of Meta Platforms are Instagram, a photo- and video-sharing social network; Messenger, an instant-messaging application; and WhatsApp, a text-message and VoIP service.
The company has a complicated early history. It began at Harvard University in 2003 as Facemash, an online service for students to judge the attractiveness of their fellow students. Because the primary developer, Zuckerberg, violated university policy in acquiring resources for the service, it was shut down after two days. Despite its mayflylike existence, 450 people (who voted 22,000 times) flocked to Facemash. That success prompted Zuckerberg to register the URL http://www.thefacebook.com in January 2004. He then created a new social network at that address with fellow students Saverin, Moskovitz, and Hughes.
Facebook has become a powerful tool for political movements, beginning with the U.S. presidential election of 2008, when more than 1,000 Facebook groups were formed in support of either Democratic candidate Barack Obama or Republican candidate John McCain. In Colombia the service was used to rally hundreds of thousands in protests against the antigovernment FARC guerrilla rebellion. In Egypt, activists protesting the government of Pres. Hosni Mubarak during the uprising of 2011 often organized themselves by forming groups on Facebook.
Facebook encourages third-party software developers to use the service. In 2006 it released its application programming interface (API) so that programmers could write software that Facebook members could use directly through the service. By 2009 developers generated about $500 million in revenue for themselves through Facebook. The company also earns revenues from developers through payments for virtual or digital products sold through third-party applications. By 2011 payments from one such company, Zynga Inc., an online game developer, accounted for 12 percent of the company’s revenues.
In February 2012 Facebook filed to become a public company. Its initial public offering (IPO) in May raised $16 billion, giving it a market value of $102.4 billion. By contrast, the largest IPO of an Internet company to date was that of the search-engine company Google Inc., which had raised $1.9 billion when it went public in 2004. By the end of the first day of the stock’s trading, Zuckerberg’s holdings were estimated at more than $19 billion.
In October 2021 Facebook announced that it was changing the name of its parent company to Meta Platforms. The name change reflected an emphasis on the “metaverse,” in which users would interact in virtual reality environments.
After attending Phillips Exeter Academy, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University in 2002. On February 4, 2004, he launched thefacebook.com (renamed Facebook in 2005), a directory in which fellow Harvard students entered their own information and photos into a template that he had devised. Within two weeks half of the student body had signed up. Zuckerberg’s roommates, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, helped him add features and make the site available to other campuses across the country. Facebook quickly became popular as registered users could create profiles, upload photos and other media, and keep in touch with friends. It differed from other social networking sites, however, in its emphasis on real names (and e-mail addresses), or “trusted connections.” It also laid particular emphasis on networking, with information disseminated not only to each individual’s network of friends but also to friends of friends—what Zuckerberg called the “social graph.”
In the summer of 2004 the trio moved their headquarters to Palo Alto, California, where Zuckerberg talked venture capitalist Peter Thiel into giving them seed money. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to concentrate on the fledgling company, of which he became CEO and president. In May 2005 Facebook received its first major infusion of venture capital ($12.7 million). Four months later Facebook opened to registration by high-school students. Meanwhile, foreign colleges and universities also began to sign up, and by September 2006 anyone with an e-mail address could join a regional network based on where he or she lived. About that time Zuckerberg turned down a $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo!, but in 2007 Facebook struck a deal with Microsoft in which the software company paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook; two years later Digital Sky Technologies purchased a 1.96 percent share for $200 million. In 2008 Zuckerberg’s new worth was estimated at about $1.5 billion. After Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) of stock in 2012, Zuckerberg’s net worth was estimated at more than $19 billion.
Clegg, who had a Dutch mother and a half-Russian father (whose aristocratic mother fled to Britain after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution), grew up bilingual, speaking English and Dutch; he later became fluent in French, German, and Spanish. He was educated at Westminster School, London, and he studied anthropology (M.A., 1989) at the University of Cambridge, political philosophy (1989–90) at the University of Minnesota, and European affairs (M.A., 1992) at the College of Europe in Brugge, Belgium. He traveled extensively and worked at various jobs in Germany, Austria, Finland, the United States, Belgium, and Hungary.
In 1994, having briefly tried his hand at journalism, Clegg became an official at the European Commission in Brussels, where he progressed to become adviser to Sir Leon Brittan, a European Union (EU) commissioner and a cabinet minister in Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. Clegg helped negotiate the admission of China to the World Trade Organization, in addition to aiding Russia in its bid for membership. Brittan regarded his young adviser as one of the brightest future politicians of his generation and urged him to pursue a career as a Conservative member of Parliament (MP). Clegg, however, felt that the Liberal Democrats far better reflected his own internationalist outlook. In 1999 he was elected as a Liberal Democrat member of the European Parliament.
Widely tipped as a future party leader, Clegg paved the way by leaving the European Parliament in 2004 and winning a seat in the 2005 British general election as MP for Hallam, a suburb of Sheffield. In January 2006, when Charles Kennedy resigned as leader of the Liberal Democrats, Clegg felt that he was too new to Parliament to stand for leader and thus backed 63-year-old Sir Menzies Campbell, who appointed Clegg as the party spokesman on home affairs. He quickly made his mark as an eloquent critic of the Labour government’s curbs on civil liberties. Less than two years later Campbell resigned, amid media criticism that he was too old to lead the party into a general election. This time Clegg decided to seek the leadership. On December 18, 2007, he defeated Chris Huhne, age 53, by a margin of just 511 votes in the balloting of more than 41,000 party members. In turn, Clegg named Huhne his replacement as spokesman on home affairs.
After taking office, Clegg sought to streamline the Liberal Democrats’ process of decision making and policy formulation; previous leaders had expressed frustration because they were required to consult members more widely than leaders of other major British parties. He was also challenged with maintaining the relevancy of the Liberal Democrats, the smallest of the three main British parties. In the lead-up to the May 2010 general election, Clegg’s popularity surged, particularly because of his widely praised performances in Britain’s first-ever televised party-leader debates; in some polls the Liberal Democrats challenged the Conservatives for first place. In the event, however, the Liberal Democrats finished a disappointing third and won 57 seats, a loss of five from the 2005 election. Clegg, however, was a key figure in the subsequent negotiations as both the Conservative and Labour parties—neither of which had secured a majority—sought to form a coalition government. The Liberal Democrats ultimately joined the Conservatives in a coalition government with David Cameron as prime minister and Clegg as deputy prime minister.
Clegg and Cameron seemed to develop an easy rapport, partly because of their similar backgrounds and shared age (both were 43 upon ascent to governing). Moreover, their parties were quick in negotiating the compromises necessary to govern together. The deficit-reduction program rolled out by the government in June and enhanced in October called for deep spending cuts that proved extremely unpopular with Liberal Democrat voters, resulting in the party’s worst showing since the merger of Liberal and Social Democratic parties in local council elections in England in May 2011. Although there were scattered calls for Clegg’s resignation as leader, support for him within the party in general remained strong. Already disgruntled over the government’s raising of university tuition in December—an action the party had opposed during the 2010 election campaign—many Liberal Democrats were upset at the Conservatives’ active opposition to the referendum to replace the first-past-the-post electoral system with the alternative vote, which had been put forward by the Liberal Democrats and was soundly rejected by British voters. In the wake of those developments, the Cameron-Clegg partnership continued on noticeably more businesslike footing.
It grew tenser in July 2012 after the government’s failure to engineer the transformation of the House of Lords into a more democratic chamber, which had been a priority for the Liberal Democrats. Rebellious Conservatives joined Labour in stifling a bill that proposed shifting the partly appointed, partly hereditary body to one with 80 percent of its members elected to single 15-year terms and 20 percent appointed. Frustrated by Cameron’s failure to marshal enough Conservative support to ensure that the bill became law, Clegg retaliated by withdrawing the Liberal Democrats’ support for a Conservative-advocated constitutional measure to reduce the number of members of the House of Commons from 650 to 600.
In local elections held in much of the United Kingdom in May 2013, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats lost considerable ground to the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which argued for British withdrawal from the EU. The rising tide of Euroskepticism among a significant portion of the British electorate had even greater consequences for the internationalist Clegg a year later, when the Liberal Democrats not only foundered badly in May 2014 elections for local councils but fell from 11 seats to 1 in elections to the European Parliament that were won by the UKIP. Again, some Liberal Democrats called for Clegg’s replacement as party leader.
In September 2014, with voting on a referendum on independence for Scotland just days off, Clegg joined Cameron and Labour Party leader Ed Miliband in jointly publishing a “vow” to increase powers for Scotland’s government if the referendum were rejected—as it was, with about 55 percent of those Scots who voted spurning independence.
The U.K. general election in May 2015 proved disastrous for the Liberal Democrats and for Clegg. Although Clegg held on to his seat, he was one of only eight Liberal Democrats who did, as the party watched its representation in Parliament fall from 57 seats to 8. The support that the Liberal Democrats lost went to candidates from both the Labour and Conservative parties, the last of which won an overall majority and would no longer need the participation of its former coalition partners to rule. On May 8, the day after the election, Clegg announced his resignation as party leader. Two months later he was succeeded by Tim Farron. Clegg failed to maintain his seat in the House of Commons in the June 2017 general election.
In 2018 Clegg became head of global policy and communications at Facebook. He was awarded a knighthood in the 2017 New Year Honours list.
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