Meta Platforms
Meta Platforms, Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads, which together are used by approximately 3.5 billion people each day, and it is among the largest companies in the world by revenue, market capitalisation and computing capacity.
| Meta Platforms, Inc. | |
|---|---|
| Type | Public |
| Traded as | Nasdaq: META; S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 component |
| Industry | Social media, advertising, artificial intelligence, virtual reality |
| Founded | 4 February 2004 as TheFacebook; renamed Meta Platforms on 28 October 2021 |
| Founder | Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes |
| Headquarters | 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, California, United States |
| Area served | Worldwide, except mainland China |
| Key people | Mark Zuckerberg (chairman and chief executive), Javier Olivan (chief operating officer), Susan Li (chief financial officer), Andrew Bosworth (chief technology officer) |
| Products | Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads, Quest, Ray-Ban Meta, Llama, Meta AI |
| Revenue | Approximately US$164 billion (2024) |
| Employees | Approximately 74,000 |
| Website | meta.com |
Almost all of Meta's revenue comes from advertising placed against the attention of its users, targeted using the information those users supply and the behaviour the company observes. The scale of that business, and the methods by which it is conducted, have made the company the subject of more regulatory action, litigation, legislative inquiry and public criticism than any other technology firm apart from Google.
Since 2021 it has committed very large sums to two undertakings outside its established business: the construction of virtual and augmented reality platforms, pursued through Reality Labs, which has accumulated operating losses exceeding US$70 billion; and, since 2023, artificial intelligence, in which it has released the Llama family of models with published weights, an approach contrary to that of its principal competitors, and has committed capital expenditure on a scale exceeded by very few companies in any industry.
History
Harvard and the early years, 2003 to 2006
Mark Zuckerberg, then a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Harvard University, wrote Facemash in October 2003, a site that placed photographs of students taken from residence directories side by side and invited visitors to choose between them. It was shut down within days and produced disciplinary proceedings.
He launched thefacebook.com on 4 February 2004 from his dormitory, with Eduardo Saverin providing initial funding, Dustin Moskovitz and Andrew McCollum programming and Chris Hughes handling promotion. Its distinguishing features were that it was restricted to verified Harvard email addresses, so that the identities were real, and that it presented a directory of people rather than a page of content. It reached more than half the undergraduate population within a month and was extended to other universities through the spring.
Three Harvard students, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, alleged that Zuckerberg had agreed to build a comparable site for them, HarvardConnection, and had delayed while building his own. The dispute settled in 2008 for cash and shares valued at approximately US$65 million, and was reopened unsuccessfully when the recipients argued the shares had been undervalued.
The company moved to Palo Alto in mid-2004. Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster, became its first president and arranged an investment of US$500,000 from Peter Thiel, and Accel Partners invested US$12.7 million in 2005. The site dropped the definite article from its name in 2005 after buying the facebook.com domain for US$200,000.
It opened to high school students in 2005 and to anyone over thirteen with an email address in September 2006, the decision that converted a university service into a general one.
News Feed, platform and growth, 2006 to 2012
The News Feed, introduced in September 2006, aggregated friends' activity into a single continuously updated stream rather than requiring users to visit profiles. It produced immediate and substantial protest, with hundreds of thousands joining groups demanding its removal on the ground that it made visible what had previously required effort to find. The company retained it with additional privacy controls, and it became the mechanism by which essentially every social platform since has been organised.
Sheryl Sandberg joined from Google as chief operating officer in 2008 and built the advertising business, which had until then been rudimentary. The Like button, introduced in 2009, provided both a low-cost engagement mechanism and, when placed on external websites, a means of observing users' browsing beyond the site itself.
Facebook Platform, opened in 2007, allowed third parties to build applications using the social graph, which produced Zynga's games and a very large developer ecosystem, and which also permitted the data access that produced the Cambridge Analytica affair.
The company listed on the Nasdaq on 18 May 2012 at US$38 a share, valuing it at US$104 billion, the largest technology offering to that date. The opening was disrupted by a failure of Nasdaq's systems, the shares fell below the offer price within days and did not recover it for more than a year, and the company was widely described as having failed to adapt to mobile devices, on which it then had almost no revenue.
The judgement proved wrong quickly. Mobile advertising, introduced in the News Feed in 2012, grew to the great majority of revenue within three years.
Instagram, WhatsApp and the acquisitions, 2012 to 2016
Meta's acquisitions are among the most consequential in commercial history.
Instagram, a photo-sharing application with thirteen employees and no revenue, was acquired in April 2012 for approximately US$1 billion, a price then regarded as extraordinary. It has since grown to more than two billion users and produces a substantial proportion of the company's revenue and, by most estimates, the majority of its profit growth.
WhatsApp, a messaging service with 450 million users, 55 employees and revenue of approximately US$20 million, was acquired in February 2014 for approximately US$19 billion in cash and stock, the largest acquisition of a venture-backed company ever made. Its founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton had built it on an explicit rejection of advertising, and both left within four years over the company's intention to monetise it; Acton subsequently funded the Signal Foundation and tweeted the instruction to delete Facebook during the Cambridge Analytica affair.
Oculus VR was acquired in March 2014 for approximately US$2 billion, the beginning of the virtual reality programme.
The pattern, of acquiring services that might have become competitors before they were large enough to attract scrutiny, became the central allegation of the antitrust case brought against the company in 2020.
Cambridge Analytica and the reckoning, 2016 to 2021
The company's position changed abruptly after the 2016 American presidential election and the British referendum on European Union membership, both of which prompted examination of how information reached voters through social platforms.
Russian interference. The Internet Research Agency, a St Petersburg organisation, had operated a large network of fabricated accounts and pages producing divisive political content that reached, by the company's own subsequent estimate, approximately 126 million Americans. Zuckerberg initially described the suggestion that Facebook had influenced the election as a pretty crazy idea, a remark he later said he regretted.
Cambridge Analytica. In March 2018 The Observer and The New York Times reported that a personality quiz application had in 2014 collected data not only from its 270,000 users but from their friends, approximately 87 million people, under the platform rules then in force, and that the data had been transferred to Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that worked for the Trump campaign. The transfer breached Facebook's terms, the company had learned of it in 2015 and had accepted an assurance that the data was deleted without verifying it.
The consequences were substantial. Zuckerberg testified before Congress in April 2018, the Federal Trade Commission imposed a US$5 billion penalty in July 2019, the largest privacy penalty ever levied and accompanied by governance requirements including a board privacy committee, and the United Kingdom's Information Commissioner fined the company £500,000, the maximum then available. The company settled a class action for US$725 million in 2022.
The Facebook Files. In September 2021 The Wall Street Journal published a series based on internal research supplied by Frances Haugen, a former product manager, which showed among other things that the company's own studies had found Instagram to worsen body image among a proportion of teenage girls, that a cross-check programme exempted millions of prominent accounts from ordinary moderation, and that a 2018 change to the News Feed algorithm intended to promote meaningful social interaction had increased the reach of outrage and misinformation. Haugen testified before the Senate and the resulting hearings were among the more damaging the company has faced.
The metaverse, 2021 to 2023
On 28 October 2021 the company renamed itself Meta Platforms, announcing that it would build the metaverse, a persistent three-dimensional environment in which people would work, socialise and transact. Zuckerberg described it as the successor to the mobile internet and committed the company to it publicly and at length.
The undertaking was pursued through Reality Labs, which develops the Quest headsets, the Horizon Worlds social platform and the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses produced with EssilorLuxottica. Its operating losses have exceeded US$70 billion cumulatively, an amount greater than the entire market capitalisation of a considerable number of large companies, and the division's revenue remains a small fraction of its spending.
The reception was poor. Horizon Worlds attracted few users and its avatars, which initially lacked legs, became an object of ridicule; the term metaverse, which had been the subject of very large corporate enthusiasm in 2021 and 2022, fell out of use; and the company's share price fell by approximately three quarters between September 2021 and November 2022, a loss of more than US$700 billion in value.
The share price fall had several causes beyond the metaverse. Apple's App Tracking Transparency, introduced in iOS 14.5 in April 2021, required applications to ask permission before tracking users across other companies' applications and websites; the great majority of users declined, and Meta estimated the effect on its 2022 revenue at approximately US$10 billion, since the data that made its advertising precise was no longer available. Competition from TikTok took attention among younger users. And the general repricing of technology shares in 2022 affected every comparable company.
The year of efficiency and recovery, 2022 to 2026
Meta announced 11,000 redundancies in November 2022, its first, and a further 10,000 in March 2023, and Zuckerberg described 2023 as a year of efficiency, flattening management, cancelling projects and reducing costs. The share price recovered more than the whole of its decline over the following two years.
The recovery rested on three things. Advertising revenue grew strongly as the company rebuilt its targeting using artificial intelligence to infer what the tracking data had previously supplied, through systems including Advantage+ that optimise campaigns automatically. Reels, the short video format introduced in response to TikTok, grew to a very large share of time spent and was monetised successfully. And Threads, a text-based service launched on 5 July 2023 in the days after Elon Musk's changes to Twitter, reached 100 million registered users within five days, the fastest adoption of any application in history, and had grown to more than 400 million monthly users by 2025.
Its artificial intelligence strategy, described below, became the company's principal strategic commitment from 2023, and its capital expenditure rose to levels among the highest of any company in the world.
In January 2025 the company announced substantial changes to its content policies in the United States, ending the third-party fact-checking programme it had operated since 2016 and replacing it with Community Notes, a crowd-sourced annotation system modelled on the one operated by X; loosening restrictions on speech concerning immigration and gender; and moving trust and safety operations from California to Texas. The changes were announced days before the inauguration of the second Trump administration, accompanied by the appointment of Dana White to the board and by a US$25 million settlement of a suit brought by Donald Trump over the suspension of his accounts after 6 January 2021, and were widely characterised as political accommodation, a characterisation the company disputed while acknowledging that its previous approach had produced too many enforcement errors.
Products
Facebook remains the largest of the applications by users, with approximately three billion monthly active people. Its composition has changed substantially: the News Feed now consists principally of recommended content from accounts a user does not follow rather than posts by friends, a change made in response to TikTok and which has altered the service's character fundamentally. Groups, Marketplace, which has become a very large classified advertising service, Events and Dating are the features of continuing growth.
Instagram is the company's most valuable asset by most assessments and the principal source of growth. Its Stories format, introduced in 2016 and closely modelled on Snapchat's, arrested that competitor's growth; Reels answered TikTok; and its position among younger users, and its function as the principal channel for influencers and for direct-to-consumer commerce, make it the centre of a substantial economy.
WhatsApp has more than two billion users and is the dominant messaging service in India, Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, Mexico and most of Europe outside the countries where iMessage or Telegram prevail. Its messages are end-to-end encrypted by default, an arrangement introduced in 2016 with the Signal Protocol and which Meta has defended against governments including the British and Indian, which have sought access.
Its monetisation has been slow and is now substantial: business messaging, in which companies communicate with customers through the application and pay per conversation, has become one of the company's faster-growing revenue lines, particularly in India and Brazil, and click-to-message advertising directs users from Facebook and Instagram into WhatsApp conversations.
Threads and Messenger
Threads competes with X for public text conversation and is integrated with Instagram, which supplied its initial users. Messenger remains among the largest messaging services in North America.
Reality Labs
Quest headsets, of which the Quest 2 sold in substantial numbers, are the leading consumer virtual reality devices. Ray-Ban Meta glasses, produced with EssilorLuxottica and containing cameras, speakers and an assistant, have sold considerably better than the headsets and are generally regarded as the division's first genuine consumer success. Orion, a prototype augmented reality device shown in 2024, is the demonstration of what the division is ultimately directed at.
Facebook in detail
Early history and the founding dispute
The company's origin has been the subject of litigation, a best-selling book and a film. Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires (2009) and David Fincher's The Social Network (2010), written by Aaron Sorkin, presented an account centred on the Winklevoss dispute and on Eduardo Saverin's dilution, which the company and Zuckerberg disputed as substantially fictionalised while conceding the outline of the events.
Saverin, who had provided the initial capital and served as chief financial officer, had his shareholding reduced from approximately 34 per cent to a fraction of that through a recapitalisation in 2005 while the other founders' holdings were preserved. He sued and settled, retaining a stake worth several billion dollars at the flotation, and renounced his American citizenship in 2011 before the offering, which produced congressional proposals to tax such renunciations.
Dustin Moskovitz left in 2008 to found Asana and has since given the great majority of his wealth through Open Philanthropy, becoming among the principal funders of the effective altruism movement. Chris Hughes left in 2007, later owned The New Republic, and in 2019 published an essay in The New York Times arguing that the company should be broken up and that Zuckerberg's control was unaccountable.
The transformation of the feed
Facebook's product has changed more fundamentally than its continuous existence suggests. The original service presented profiles; the News Feed of 2006 presented friends' activity; the introduction of pages and of algorithmic ranking made it a publishing medium; the emphasis on video from 2015, pursued on the basis of metrics the company subsequently acknowledged had been overstated, produced a very large and damaging reallocation of investment by publishers; the 2018 change to promote meaningful social interaction reduced publisher reach substantially; and the shift from 2022 toward recommending content from unconnected accounts, in imitation of TikTok, has made it a discovery service in which the social graph is a signal rather than the structure.
Each change has moved value between constituencies without notice or appeal. Publishers who built businesses on Facebook traffic lost them; page owners who accumulated followers found that reaching them required payment; and the company's recurring position, that it is adjusting the product for users, has been accurate and has not addressed the dependence its own earlier encouragement created.
Free Basics and international expansion
Internet.org, launched in 2013 and subsequently Free Basics, offered free mobile access to a limited set of services including Facebook in developing countries, on arrangements with mobile operators who did not charge for the data.
It was prohibited in India in February 2016 by the telecommunications regulator, which found that it breached net neutrality by making some services free and others chargeable, after a public campaign in which more than a million people submitted objections. A board member's response, suggesting that anti-colonialism had been economically catastrophic for India, was disavowed by the company and did considerable further damage.
The programme continued elsewhere and was substantially wound down. Its consequence in several countries was that Facebook became synonymous with the internet for people whose first access was through it, a position that amplified the effects described in Myanmar and elsewhere.
Instagram and WhatsApp in detail
Instagram was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in 2010, and its acquisition price of approximately US$1 billion for a company with no revenue was widely ridiculed at the time. Its founders left in 2018, reportedly over increasing constraints on their autonomy, and Adam Mosseri has led it since.
Its commercial importance now exceeds Facebook's in growth terms, and its cultural significance is substantial: it created the influencer as an occupation, established the aesthetic conventions of a decade of photography, and, through Stories and Reels, supplied the formats the rest of the industry adopted. Its effects on adolescent self-image are the subject of the litigation described above and of the company's own suppressed research.
WhatsApp was founded in 2009 by Jan Koum, a Ukrainian immigrant who had grown up without a telephone, and Brian Acton, both former Yahoo employees whom Facebook had declined to hire. Its design principles were the absence of advertising, of games and of gimmicks, and a note reading no ads, no games, no gimmicks was taped to Koum's desk.
Its acquisition for US$19 billion was the largest for a venture-backed company ever made. The founders obtained an undertaking that the service would remain advertising-free and that user data would not be combined with Facebook's; the company announced in 2016 that it would share phone numbers with Facebook, which produced a €110 million fine from the European Commission in 2017 for having stated during the merger review that such matching was not technically possible. Both founders left, and Acton's public instruction to delete Facebook during the Cambridge Analytica affair is among the more pointed acts of any technology founder.
Technology and infrastructure
Meta operates among the largest computing infrastructures in the world, comprising more than twenty data centre regions and a private network connecting them, and its engineering contributions have been substantial and substantially given away.
Open Compute Project, founded in 2011, published the company's designs for servers, storage, racks, networking and data centre facilities, on the reasoning that standardising the industry's hardware would reduce costs for everyone including Meta. It has been adopted by a very large proportion of large-scale operators and has changed how data centre equipment is designed and procured.
PyTorch is described above. React, released in 2013, is the most widely used interface library in web development and has shaped how a generation of applications is built. GraphQL, Cassandra, originally developed at Facebook and released in 2008, RocksDB, Presto and HHVM are among the other systems the company has released, and the aggregate contribution to public software infrastructure is comparable to Google's.
Its technical problems are those of extreme scale: serving a personalised feed to three billion people, each computation ranking thousands of candidate items in the time a page takes to load; storing and serving several hundred billion photographs; delivering messages reliably across networks of every quality; and performing content classification across every language in which its services operate, which is the source of a genuine and frequently criticised asymmetry, since the classifiers for English are far better than those for Burmese, Amharic or Tagalog.
Artificial intelligence
Meta has been a substantial contributor to artificial intelligence research since establishing Facebook AI Research in 2013 under Yann LeCun, who shared the 2018 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for the development of deep learning and who has remained the company's chief AI scientist, and it has been among the most consistent advocates of open publication in a field that has become progressively more secretive.
PyTorch, released by the company in 2016, became the dominant framework for machine learning research, displacing Google's TensorFlow, and was transferred to an independent foundation in 2022.
Llama, the family of large language models released from February 2023, is the company's most consequential contribution. Unlike the models of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, which are accessible only through interfaces their owners control, Llama's weights are published and may be downloaded, modified and run by anyone, subject to a licence restricting very large commercial users and certain applications. The first version's weights leaked within a week of a restricted research release, and the company subsequently embraced the approach, releasing successive versions openly.
The strategic reasoning, which Zuckerberg has set out explicitly, is that Meta does not sell models and therefore loses nothing by giving them away; that an open ecosystem produces improvements the company can use; that it prevents a competitor establishing the proprietary platform on which the industry depends, which Meta regards as the mistake that left it dependent on Apple and Google in mobile; and that commoditising the model shifts value to the applications and distribution that Meta possesses.
The approach has been criticised on safety grounds, on the argument that published weights cannot be withdrawn and that safeguards can be removed by anyone with the file, and defended on the grounds that open models permit independent scrutiny, that the capabilities concerned are available elsewhere, and that concentrating the technology in three companies is itself a risk.
In 2025 the company reorganised its artificial intelligence work into Meta Superintelligence Labs, acquired 49 per cent of Scale AI for approximately US$14.3 billion and installed its founder Alexandr Wang as chief AI officer, and recruited researchers from competitors at compensation levels that were widely reported and that altered the market for such people. Its capital expenditure, directed principally at data centres and accelerators, rose toward US$70 billion a year and beyond, including a very large facility in Louisiana, and the company has committed to spending at a level that a very small number of firms could contemplate.
Meta AI, the assistant embedded in Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger and available separately, reaches a distribution no competitor has, since it is placed in front of several billion people who did not seek it out, and the company has stated that this rather than model quality alone is its advantage.
Business model
Meta sells advertising. Approximately 98 per cent of its revenue comes from placing advertisements in the feeds, stories, reels and messaging surfaces of its applications, priced at auction and targeted using the information users provide, the behaviour the company observes and the inferences it draws.
The system's effectiveness derives from three things: the number of people it reaches, which for many advertisers is the entire relevant market; the precision of targeting, which allows a small business to reach exactly the audience it wants without the waste of broadcast advertising; and measurement, which shows the advertiser what a campaign produced.
Apple's App Tracking Transparency damaged the second and third of these substantially, and the company's response has been to rebuild them using modelling rather than observation: systems that infer the likely outcome of an advertisement from aggregate patterns rather than from following an individual across the internet. The rebuilding has been successful enough that revenue growth returned to more than 20 per cent, and it has required very large quantities of computation, which is part of why the company's artificial intelligence investment and its advertising business are not separate matters.
Its customer base is unusual in its breadth: more than ten million advertisers, the great majority of them small businesses for which Meta's applications are the principal means of reaching customers, which gives the company a political constituency and which it has invoked in regulatory debate.
Advertising in detail
Meta's advertising system is among the most sophisticated commercial mechanisms ever built and is the reason the company exists in its present form.
An advertiser specifies an objective, such as a purchase, an application installation or a lead, a budget and, formerly, a detailed audience definition. The system then conducts an auction for each available impression, in real time, ranking the candidate advertisements by the advertiser's bid multiplied by the estimated probability that the particular user will take the desired action, together with an estimate of the quality of the experience. The advertiser whose combination is highest wins and pays approximately what was required to beat the next bidder.
The arrangement is efficient in a specific and important sense: an advertiser does not pay for exposure but for the probability of an outcome, and the system's task is to predict that probability. The prediction is where the machine learning is applied, and it is the reason the loss of tracking data mattered so much and the reason the company's artificial intelligence investment is inseparable from its advertising.
Advantage+ campaigns, introduced from 2022, remove the targeting decision from the advertiser entirely: the advertiser supplies creative material and a budget and the system determines who sees it. The results have generally been better than human targeting, which is unsurprising, and the change has shifted the advertiser's role from selecting audiences to supplying material, which the company is now also generating automatically.
The system's principal externality is what it selects for. An auction ranking by predicted engagement will favour material that provokes, and the same mechanism that makes an advertisement effective makes an inflammatory post widely seen. The two are not separable, because they are the same ranking function applied to different inventory.
Reality Labs in detail
The virtual and augmented reality programme is the largest sustained investment any company has made in a consumer technology that does not yet have a market.
Oculus, founded by Palmer Luckey with a Kickstarter campaign in 2012 and acquired in 2014, produced the Rift for personal computers and then the standalone Quest, which removed the requirement for a tethered computer and which has sold in the tens of millions. Luckey left in 2017 following controversy over a political donation and subsequently founded the defence company Anduril.
Horizon Worlds, the social environment, has not succeeded. Its user numbers have been reported as very low relative to the investment, its graphics were mocked, and the absence of legs on its avatars, a consequence of the difficulty of inferring lower body position from head and hand tracking, became a widely circulated illustration of the gap between the company's presentation and its product.
Ray-Ban Meta glasses, containing cameras, open-ear speakers and an assistant with a display in later versions, have been the division's commercial success, selling in millions and demonstrating that the market may be for lightweight devices that add to the world rather than headsets that replace it. Orion, shown as a prototype in 2024, is a full augmented reality device with holographic display and a neural wristband reading muscle signals for input, and the company has said it will not be a product for several years.
The strategic argument for the investment is that Meta was dependent on Apple and Google for access to its users on mobile devices, that this dependence cost it billions when Apple changed its privacy rules, and that the company must own the next platform rather than build on someone else's. The argument is coherent, and the cost has been very large, and whether the next platform will be spatial computing or artificial intelligence assistants is precisely the question on which the company has now placed a second and larger bet.
Reception and cultural position
Meta occupies a position in public opinion unlike that of any comparable company. Its products are used by roughly half of humanity and are, in survey after survey, among the least trusted institutions in the countries that measure such things.
The gap is explicable. The products are useful, free and habitual; the criticisms concern consequences that are diffuse, contested and mediated by design decisions users cannot observe. A person may use WhatsApp to speak to their family every day and simultaneously believe that the company that owns it has damaged their society, and both propositions may be correct.
The company's own public presentation has moved with the criticism. Its early register was idealistic, expressed in the mission to make the world more open and connected, adopted in 2004 and retained until 2017, when it was revised to giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together, an acknowledgement that connection alone had not proved sufficient. Its recent presentation, particularly since 2024, has been considerably less idealistic and more explicitly commercial and political, which several commentators have read as the more honest position.
Zuckerberg himself has been the subject of an unusual quantity of attention, from the Sorkin film to a decade of congressional testimony to a personal rebranding from 2023 involving mixed martial arts, gold chains and a public manner markedly different from the one he had presented for twenty years. The shift was widely mocked and was also effective: the company's share price and its standing among investors both improved through the same period.
Regulation and litigation
Antitrust
The Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of states sued Meta in December 2020, alleging that it had maintained a monopoly in personal social networking by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp to neutralise competitive threats and by restricting the access of potential competitors to its platform. The case was dismissed in 2021 for inadequate definition of the market, refiled, and tried in 2025.
In November 2025 Judge James Boasberg found for Meta, holding that the Commission had failed to establish that the company currently holds monopoly power in the market it had defined, principally because TikTok and YouTube compete for the same attention. The decision does not address whether the acquisitions were anticompetitive when made, and the Commission has indicated it will appeal.
The European Commission fined Meta €797 million in November 2024 over the tying of Facebook Marketplace to Facebook, and designated it a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act, which prohibits self-preferencing and the combination of data across services without consent. The company's pay-or-consent arrangement, offering European users a subscription as an alternative to personalised advertising, was found in preliminary findings to breach the Act, and a reduced-personalisation free option was introduced in response.
Privacy
Beyond Cambridge Analytica, Meta has been fined €1.2 billion by the Irish Data Protection Commission in May 2023 over transfers of European personal data to the United States, at the time the largest penalty under the General Data Protection Regulation, together with €390 million in January 2023 over the legal basis for personalised advertising, €265 million in 2022 over scraped data and €225 million in 2021 concerning WhatsApp transparency. South Korean, Brazilian, Turkish and Indian regulators have taken comparable action.
Content and harm
Myanmar. A United Nations fact-finding mission concluded in 2018 that Facebook had played a determining role in the incitement of violence against the Rohingya, and the company's own commissioned assessment accepted that it had not done enough. Amnesty International's 2022 report argued that the recommendation algorithms had actively amplified the material, and litigation has been brought in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Teen mental health. More than forty American states sued the company in October 2023 alleging that it had designed its products to be addictive to minors and had concealed internal research on their effects, and a very large number of school districts and individuals have brought consolidated proceedings. The company disputes the causal claims, noting that the research on social media and adolescent wellbeing is genuinely contested, and has introduced teen accounts with default restrictions.
Moderation generally. The company employs and contracts many thousands of moderators, whose working conditions have produced litigation in the United States, Kenya and Ireland over psychological harm, and it has been criticised simultaneously for removing too much lawful expression and for permitting too much harmful content, from every political direction and in almost every country in which it operates.
Libra and Diem
In June 2019 Facebook announced Libra, a proposed global currency backed by a basket of assets and governed by an association of companies including Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Uber, Spotify and Vodafone, with a wallet, Calibra, to be built by Facebook itself.
The reaction from governments was immediate and hostile. Central bankers and finance ministers in the United States, France, Germany and elsewhere stated that a private currency operated by a company with two billion users could not be permitted to launch without a regulatory framework that did not exist, and that it threatened monetary sovereignty. Zuckerberg was summoned before the House Financial Services Committee in October 2019, where the questioning ranged well beyond the proposal.
The corporate members withdrew within months. The project was renamed Diem in December 2020, its scope reduced to a dollar-backed stablecoin, and in January 2022 its assets were sold to Silvergate Bank for approximately US$200 million and the association was wound up. Novi, the wallet, was discontinued in 2022.
The episode's significance exceeds its outcome. It prompted central banks worldwide to accelerate work on digital currencies of their own, on the reasoning that if private issuance was coming the state should be there first, and the regulatory frameworks for stablecoins subsequently adopted in the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States were written substantially in response to it.
Elections and political speech
Meta's platforms carry a very large proportion of political communication in most democracies, and its decisions about what to permit have become matters of public consequence.
Its position has moved repeatedly. It declined to fact-check political advertising, on the argument that a private company should not adjudicate politicians' claims, while removing such advertising entirely in the week before the 2020 American election. It suspended Donald Trump's accounts after the attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, referred the decision to the Oversight Board, which criticised the indefinite nature of the suspension and required a defined penalty, and reinstated him in January 2023.
The Oversight Board, established in 2020 and funded by an irrevocable trust, is an independent body of academics, lawyers, journalists and former officials empowered to overturn the company's content decisions in individual cases and to make non-binding policy recommendations. It has been described as an attempt to establish something resembling due process on a platform, and criticised as handling a negligible number of cases relative to the volume and as addressing symptoms rather than the ranking systems that determine what is seen.
In January 2025 the company ended third-party fact-checking in the United States, replacing it with Community Notes, and relaxed restrictions in several categories. The change was defended as correcting an excess of enforcement error and criticised as political accommodation; its practical effects will take years to assess.
The company has also periodically removed political content from recommendations, most substantially in 2021 and again in 2024, on the reasoning that users report not wanting it, a decision whose consequence is that a platform carrying a large share of public discussion has decided to carry less of it.
Competition
Meta competes for attention with TikTok, which has been its most effective competitor and which altered the design of its products; with YouTube, which holds the largest share of video watching; with Snapchat, whose position among younger users it has attacked continuously since 2013; with X, against which Threads competes; with Reddit, Discord, Pinterest and the messaging services Telegram, Signal and iMessage; and, in China, with platforms it does not operate in.
For advertising it competes with Google, with Amazon, whose retail advertising has grown very rapidly because it captures purchase intent directly, with TikTok and with the connected television platforms.
In artificial intelligence it competes with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI and the Chinese developers, and its open-weight strategy places it in an unusual position, since its models are used by competitors and by researchers who would otherwise have no access.
In hardware it competes with Apple, whose Vision Pro addresses the same category as Quest at a very different price, and with the Chinese headset manufacturers.
Its most consequential structural competitor is Apple, which is not in any of its businesses but which controls the operating system on which a very large proportion of Meta's users reach it and which has used that control, through App Tracking Transparency, to impose a cost on Meta measured in tens of billions of dollars. The conflict between the two companies, conducted through privacy policy, App Store rules, public statements and regulatory submissions, is among the most consequential commercial disputes in the industry.
Philanthropy
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, established in December 2015 by Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, is a limited liability company rather than a foundation, a structure permitting political donation and investment as well as grant-making and which attracted criticism at its creation as offering the reputational benefits of philanthropy without the constraints. They pledged to give 99 per cent of their Meta shares over their lives.
Its principal programmes are in biomedical science, including the Biohub network established with Stanford, Berkeley and the University of California San Francisco and a commitment to develop tools to cure, prevent or manage all disease by the end of the century; in education, where its work on personalised learning software has been contested; and, formerly, in criminal justice reform and immigration advocacy, which were discontinued in 2024 and 2025.
Zuckerberg's US$400 million donation through the Center for Tech and Civic Life to support election administration in 2020 became a substantial political controversy in the United States, characterised by critics as private funding of public election infrastructure, and a number of states subsequently prohibited such donations.
Timeline
Key dates include Facemash in October 2003 and the launch of thefacebook.com on 4 February 2004; the move to Palo Alto and the Thiel investment in 2004; the News Feed in September 2006 and the opening to the general public in the same month; the Like button in 2009; the flotation on 18 May 2012; the acquisition of Instagram in April 2012, of WhatsApp in February 2014 and of Oculus in March 2014; the Internet.org programme from 2013 and its prohibition in India in 2016; the Russian interference disclosures of 2017; Cambridge Analytica in March 2018 and the US$5 billion Federal Trade Commission penalty in July 2019; the Libra announcement in June 2019 and its abandonment in January 2022; the suspension of Trump's accounts in January 2021 and the establishment of the Oversight Board; the Apple App Tracking Transparency change in April 2021; the Facebook Files and Frances Haugen's testimony in September and October 2021; the renaming to Meta Platforms on 28 October 2021; the share price decline of 2022 and the redundancies of November 2022 and March 2023; the launch of Llama in February 2023 and of Threads on 5 July 2023; the state lawsuits over adolescent harm in October 2023; the €797 million European fine in November 2024; the content policy changes of January 2025; the Scale AI investment and the formation of Meta Superintelligence Labs in 2025; and the dismissal of the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust case in November 2025.
Content moderation
Meta removes or restricts material under Community Standards running to tens of thousands of words, covering violence and incitement, dangerous organisations, hate speech, bullying, adult content, misinformation about health and elections, intellectual property and a considerable number of further categories.
The enforcement is conducted at a scale that makes human review of everything impossible. The great majority of removals are made by classifiers before anyone reports the material, and the company publishes quarterly reports stating, for each category, how much content it acted on and what proportion it found proactively. Several thousand human reviewers, employed principally through contractors in Ireland, Poland, Kenya, the Philippines and the United States, handle appeals and the material the classifiers cannot decide.
The difficulties are structural and are not particular to this company. Classifiers trained principally on English perform considerably worse in other languages, which is the mechanism by which the Myanmar failure occurred; context determines whether a statement is incitement or reportage, and a classifier does not have it; the volume makes an error rate of a small fraction of a per cent amount to millions of wrong decisions; and any rule applied consistently will produce outcomes that offend someone, while any rule applied inconsistently will produce accusations of bias.
The moderators' own conditions have produced litigation. A class action in California settled in 2020 for US$52 million over psychological harm, and proceedings in Kenya brought by moderators employed through Sama over pay, conditions and dismissal following organising attempts have continued, with Kenyan courts holding that Meta may be joined as a party, a finding of some consequence for the contractor model generally.
Meta and news
The company's relationship with journalism has passed through three phases. It encouraged publishers onto the platform through the 2010s, funding video production and promising distribution; it then reduced their reach through successive algorithm changes; and it has since largely withdrawn from news altogether, removing the news tab in several countries and, in Canada, blocking news links entirely in 2023 in response to the Online News Act requiring payment.
The effect on publishing has been substantial and is disputed in its attribution. Facebook referral traffic, which had constituted a very large proportion of visits to news sites, fell by roughly 80 per cent between 2018 and 2024, and a considerable number of publications built on it have closed. The company's position is that news was never a large proportion of what its users wanted, that it constitutes approximately three per cent of what people see, and that publishers chose to build on a channel they did not control.
Both accounts are accurate, and the outcome is that a very large part of the world's population now receives whatever information reaches it through ranking systems optimised for engagement rather than through any editorial process, which is the most consequential single fact about Meta and the one least amenable to remedy by any regulation yet proposed.
Corporate affairs
Control and governance
Mark Zuckerberg holds Class B shares carrying ten votes each and controls approximately 61 per cent of the voting power while owning roughly 13 per cent of the economic interest. He is chairman and chief executive, cannot be removed by the board, and the arrangement has survived every shareholder proposal to alter it, since the votes required to do so are his.
The concentration is unusual even by the standards of founder-controlled technology companies and has been the subject of continuous criticism from institutional investors and governance organisations. Its defence, which Zuckerberg has made explicitly, is that it permits decisions with horizons longer than the market's, of which the metaverse investment and the open release of Llama are the clearest examples; both were very costly and neither would have survived a shareholder vote.
Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer from 2008 to 2022, built the advertising business and was for most of that period the company's public representative to advertisers, regulators and the press, a division of labour that permitted Zuckerberg to concentrate on product. Her departure and the elimination of the role, with responsibilities distributed to Javier Olivan and others, marked a consolidation of authority.
Employees
Meta employs approximately 74,000 people, having reduced from more than 87,000 through the redundancies of 2022 and 2023. Its compensation is among the highest in the industry, its performance management is among the most demanding, and it has periodically conducted low-performer removals of several per cent of staff.
Its culture was long characterised by the phrase move fast and break things, printed on posters throughout its offices and describing a preference for shipping quickly and correcting afterwards. It was revised in 2014 to move fast with stable infrastructure, and the original formulation has been quoted against the company in essentially every subsequent controversy.
Locations
The headquarters at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park occupies the former Sun Microsystems campus, and the MPK20 building designed by Frank Gehry, opened in 2015, is among the largest open-plan offices in the world. The company operates offices in New York, Seattle, Austin, London, Dublin, Tel Aviv, Singapore and a considerable number of other cities, and data centres in Oregon, Iowa, North Carolina, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland and a growing number of further locations.
Its data centres have been among the earlier large facilities to run entirely on renewable electricity, and the company has published its designs through the Open Compute Project, which it founded in 2011 and which has made server, storage and network hardware designs freely available and has substantially changed how large data centres are built.
Finances
Meta reported revenue of approximately US$164 billion in 2024 with net income above US$62 billion and operating margins above 40 per cent. Its Family of Apps segment is very profitable; Reality Labs loses between US$15 billion and US$20 billion a year.
It began paying a dividend in 2024, having previously returned capital only through repurchases, which have been very large. Its capital expenditure, historically modest for a company of its revenue, has risen to among the largest in the world as it builds computing capacity for artificial intelligence, and the market's assessment of that spending has moved between approval and alarm depending on the quarter.
Criticism
The engagement objection
The most general criticism of Meta is structural rather than about any particular decision. A service funded by advertising is optimised for attention; an algorithm optimising for engagement will promote whatever produces it; and what produces engagement includes outrage, conflict, novelty and material that confirms what a person already believes.
The company's own internal research, disclosed by Frances Haugen, documented this in its own terms: the 2018 algorithm change intended to promote meaningful social interaction was found by the company's researchers to have increased the reach of divisive content, and political parties in several European countries told the company that they had adjusted their communications toward the negative because the platform rewarded it.
Meta's response has been that the research is more equivocal than the reporting suggested, that it has made changes reducing political content in feeds, and that the causal claims connecting social media to polarisation and to declining adolescent wellbeing are contested in the academic literature, which is accurate. The objection nonetheless persists because the incentive is structural and cannot be removed without changing how the company earns money.
Copying competitors
Meta has repeatedly reproduced competitors' features: Stories from Snapchat, Reels from TikTok, Threads from Twitter, and a considerable number of smaller instances. The practice is lawful, is common across the industry, and has been unusually effective, since a feature placed in front of two billion existing users does not need to be better to prevail.
Its most documented instance was the sustained attempt to copy Snapchat from 2013, after that company declined a US$3 billion acquisition offer, which the internal documents disclosed in litigation described in detail and which is the principal evidence advanced for the proposition that the company competes by imitation and acquisition rather than by innovation.
Data and surveillance
The company's business requires knowing a great deal about its users, and the methods have repeatedly exceeded what users understood. The tracking of non-users through the Like button and the Meta Pixel, the collection of call and message logs from Android devices, the Onavo VPN application which monitored users' use of competing applications and which Apple removed, and the inference of attributes including political views, sexual orientation and health status from behaviour, have each been the subject of regulatory action.
The company's position is that its practices are disclosed, that its targeting benefits users by making advertising relevant, and that the alternative, subscription, is available in Europe and is taken by very few people.
Assessment
Meta connects a larger proportion of humanity than any institution in history. Approximately 3.5 billion people use one of its applications every day, WhatsApp is the means by which a very large part of the world's population communicates, and Instagram and Facebook are the principal channels through which several hundred million small businesses reach customers.
Its record is equally the record of what such a position produces. It has been used to organise genocide in Myanmar, to distribute fabricated material to voters in a considerable number of elections, to carry the harassment of individuals at a scale no other medium permits, and to deliver to adolescents a continuous comparison with edited versions of their contemporaries' lives. The company has responded to each of these belatedly and partially, and its own documents establish that it understood several of them before it acted.
Its commercial position is very strong and its principal risks are political rather than competitive. The antitrust case against it has been decided in its favour at first instance; the European regulatory framework constrains its data practices materially; and the American legislative interest in children's safety and in platform liability is the most probable source of binding restriction.
Its bet on artificial intelligence, made at a scale and in a form contrary to its competitors', is the largest commercial decision Zuckerberg has taken since the WhatsApp acquisition, and its outcome will determine whether the company's second decade as a public company resembles its first.