American online social media and social networking service
Facebook is an American social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms. It was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, along with his Harvard College roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The name Facebook derives from the face book directories often given to American university students.
The service was initially targeted to Harvard students only before gradually expanding to other universities in North America. Since 2006, Facebook has permitted registration by individuals aged 13 and older, with the exception of South Korea, Spain, and Quebec, where the minimum age is 14.
As of December 2023, Facebook reported approximately 3.07 billion monthly active users worldwide. As of July 2025, it was ranked as the third-most-visited website in the world, with 23 percent of its traffic originating from the United States. It was the most downloaded mobile application of the 2010s.
Facebook can be accessed from devices with Internet connectivity, such as personal computers, tablets and smartphones. After registering, users can create a profile revealing personal information about themselves.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Facebook” is american online social media and social networking service. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Facebook, American and online, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “american online social media and social networking service” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q355. VIAF identifies the subject as 186061244. The Library of Congress control number is n2007076967. 2 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2004, 2006, 2023 and 2025.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Facebook” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.