Facebook, formerly The Facebook, is a free social networking website. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some American colleges give to incoming students as a way to get to know other people on campus.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook while he was a student at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 240 million active users worldwide.
It wasn't very known until 2008/2009, when the media (television in particular) started mentioning the name frequently, which must have sparked a trend for people to register there.
Facebook has introduced numerous privacy issues. Pictures tagged on Facebook may soon help facial recognition software and monitoring systems to be able to recognize everyone wherever they go. Facebook was also mining data of its users which allowed some groups to manipulate it and influence whom people on social media would vote for in 2016.