(NewsNation) — Twenty years ago, a college sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg launched a website called TheFacebook.com from his Harvard dorm room. Now the parent company Meta has a market value of $599 billion and more than 3 billion people use at least one Meta product daily.
Zuckerberg first came up with the idea in 2003 when he created a website where he infamously encouraged other Harvard students to rank their fellow classmates by attractiveness.
The website was quickly taken down after being accused of privacy, but in 2004, Zuckerberg built thefacebook.com, which later became just Facebook. The site quickly expanded through nearby colleges. By the end of 2005, it had 6 million active users and advertisers.
Soon after, the website went international, going from a social media platform where people posted concert pictures and relationship updates, to being a key player in the 2008 presidential election and a forum for political discourse.
In 2012, the company went public and bought Instagram, introducing an era of diversification. Later, it bought WhatsApp and Oculus VR.
In 2021, the company rebranded to Meta, emphasizing its future in driving the metaverse revolution and its several projects and acquisitions.
“There are an almost countless number of different types of groups and identities and various formulations of human connection that have been fostered on Facebook,” says Justin Hendrix, the editor of Tech Policy Press.
“That comes with unintended consequences, and we don’t know what it means to connect so many minds together. We don’t know how it changes the way we interact with one another,” Hendrix added.
Still, 20 years later, Facebook has shown unprecedented staying power. First, gaining popularity through its exclusivity, then changing how online relationships are created by “likes,” comments, shares, and friend counts, helped along by a news feed updating users on the lives of their friends and acquaintances.
“From a cultural standpoint, there has been a very clear trend towards the gamification of social relations,” said Pablo Boczkowski, a professor at the department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University who studies digital culture. “Facebook tapped into that and intensified that in society through its success. You can check what others in your peer group have and compare yourself to them, in a way you really can’t do in your personal life.”
