Facebook Launched
Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook from his Harvard dorm room
February 04, 2004
The Dorm Room That Rewired Society
On February 4, 2004, 19-year-old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launched "TheFacebook" — a social network for Harvard students only. Within 24 hours, 1,200 students had signed up. Within a month, it had spread to Yale, Columbia, and Stanford. By the end of 2004 it had one million users. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard and moved the company to Silicon Valley. The "The" was dropped, and Facebook began its climb to connecting a third of humanity.
How It Grew
Facebook's key insight was the News Feed, launched in 2006, which turned visiting the site from a deliberate act into a habit. The "Like" button, added in 2009, gamified social interaction. Opening the platform to developers allowed apps to spread virally through friend networks. By the time Facebook went public in its 2012 IPO, it had 900 million users and was collecting data on human behavior at a scale never seen before.
The Consequences
Facebook has been credited with connecting separated families, organizing political movements, and keeping people in touch across time zones and continents. It has also been associated with election interference, the spread of misinformation, teenage mental health crises, and mass surveillance through targeted advertising. Zuckerberg testified before the US Congress in 2018. The platform's impact — positive and negative — on democracy, mental health, and truth is still being measured.