Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Eduardo Saverin while they were students at Harvard University. Initially, it was only available to Harvard students, but it quickly expanded to other universities and eventually became available to anyone with an email address.

In 2007, Facebook introduced the News Feed feature, which allowed users to see updates from their friends in real-time. This feature caused some controversy, as users were concerned about their privacy and the amount of personal information that was being shared.

Despite these concerns, Facebook continued to grow rapidly and in 2012, it went public with an initial public offering (IPO) that raised $16 billion, making it one of the largest tech IPOs in history.

Since then, Facebook has faced a number of controversies, including allegations of data privacy violations, the spread of misinformation and fake news, and the use of the platform to interfere in elections. The company has taken steps to address these issues, such as implementing new privacy policies and hiring fact-checkers to combat false information.

Today, Facebook is one of the most widely used social media platforms in the world, with over 2.7 billion monthly active users as of 2021. It has also expanded to include other services such as Instagram and WhatsApp, which it acquired in 2012 and 2014, respectively.