Facebook

Facebook, Inc. is the social-networking company that Mark Zuckerberg launched as thefacebook.com while a student at Harvard University in February 2004. The company was renamed Meta Platforms, Inc. in October 2021.¹ Its first significant outside investor was Peter Thiel. Its February 2012 registration statement named Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Jim Breyer among its directors, and it listed Thiel-managed entities and Accel funds as holders of large blocks of its Class B stock.²

Launch and first investment

The Harvard Crimson reported on February 9, 2004 that Zuckerberg, a member of the class of 2006, had launched the site after coding for about a week. The article reads: "After about a week of coding, Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com last Wednesday afternoon." The Wednesday in question was February 4, 2004.³ The company was incorporated in Delaware in July 2004.²

Thiel invested 500,000 dollars in thefacebook.com in 2004, which made him the first significant outside investor in the site.⁴ Thiel and Founders Fund sold the majority of the position across the 2012 public offering and the following years, with a realized return in the range of two billion dollars.⁵ A 2016 essay in the blog Cyborgology titled "Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel's French Connection" reads the investment through the mimetic theory of René Girard.⁶

Board seats and holdings in the 2012 registration statement

The company filed a Form S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 1, 2012, before its initial public offering.² The filing states that Thiel has been a director "since April 2005," that he has been a partner of Founders Fund since 2005, and that he had been president of Clarium Capital Management since 2002 and was a co-founder of PayPal.⁷ Breyer is listed as a director from the same month, as a partner of Accel since 1987, and as the founder and chief executive of Breyer Capital. Andreessen is listed as a director since June 2008 and as a general partner of Andreessen Horowitz since July 2009.⁷ Andreessen, Erskine Bowles and Thiel formed the audit committee, and Breyer and Donald Graham formed the compensation committee.⁷ Andreessen's other directorships at the time were eBay Inc. and Hewlett-Packard, and Breyer's were Dell, News Corporation, Prosper Marketplace and Wal-Mart Stores.⁷ Sheryl Sandberg is listed as chief operating officer since March 2008.⁷ Mike Schroepfer is listed as vice president of engineering since September 2008.⁷

The holdings section of the filing shows the equity behind those seats. Rivendell One LLC held 32,875,670 shares of Class B common stock, and the filing states that Thiel is its beneficial owner. The Founders Fund partnerships held 5,978,140, 740,960, 36,640 and 22,400 shares, and Lembas, LLC held 5,070,290 shares, for which Thiel is the managing member.⁸ Accel's holdings were larger. Accel IX L.P. held 149,527,730 shares of Class B common stock, Accel IX Strategic Partners held 15,931,653 shares, and Accel 2005 held 13,939,214 shares. Breyer is one of the managing members of the general partners of these funds.⁸ The Class B stock carries ten votes per share, and the filing describes Zuckerberg as the holder of the majority of the voting power.²

The same filing describes an Investors' Rights Agreement that the company first entered in connection with its Series A financing in 2005. Entities affiliated with Thiel, Accel Partners and DST Global were parties to it.⁹ Thiel's board service ended in February 2022, when he announced that he would step down. CNBC reported that he declined reelection to focus on funding pro-Trump political candidates ahead of the midterms.¹⁰

The filing reports 845 million monthly active users as of December 31, 2011, an increase of 39 percent from 608 million a year earlier.²

LifeLog and the February 2004 launch

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ran a program named LifeLog that was intended to record and organize a person's experiences. Noah Shachtman reported in Wired News on February 4, 2004, the day thefacebook.com went online, that the Pentagon had canceled the program, which he described as "an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person's entire existence." LifeLog "aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, the plane tickets bought, the e-mail sent and received."¹¹ The report states that researchers close to the project were unsure why it had been "dropped late last month," that DARPA gave no explanation, and that "A change in priorities" was the only rationale its spokeswoman, Jan Walker, gave. It places the cancellation after Congress eliminated the Terrorism Information Awareness data-mining initiative and after the withdrawal of the Policy Analysis Market, and it reports that civil libertarians had argued when the program debuted in spring 2003 that LifeLog "could become the ultimate tool for profiling potential enemies of the state."¹¹¹² Howard Shrobe, who led a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory that had spent weeks preparing a bid for a LifeLog contract, said the team was "quite disappointed." The same report records that private-sector work in the area continued, naming Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits program at Microsoft, and quotes an MIT computer scientist's expectation that such research "will continue" at DARPA.¹¹

PRISM

In June 2013 the Guardian published a top-secret slide presentation describing a National Security Agency program called PRISM. The article reported that the NSA "has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants," according to the document. The slides listed Facebook as a provider that joined in 2009, along with Google and PalTalk, after Yahoo in 2008.¹³

The company answered on June 6, 2013. Its statement to TechCrunch read: "We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers."¹⁴ On June 7 Zuckerberg published a personal statement that said "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers," and added: "We hadn't even heard of PRISM before yesterday."¹⁵ A senior administration official's statement, published with the article, said that the Section 702 authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act "does not allow the targeting of any US citizen."¹³ Zuckerberg wrote that the company had "never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk," and that when governments ask, "we review each request carefully."¹⁵

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board described the mechanism in its report on Section 702 of July 2, 2014. In what it called "PRISM collection," the government, specifically the Federal Bureau of Investigation acting for the National Security Agency, sends selectors such as an email address to a United States electronic communications service provider that "has been served a directive," and the provider "is compelled to give the communications sent to or from that selector to the government." The board reported that the NSA receives all PRISM collection, that the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI each receive a select portion, and that "as of mid-2011, 91 percent of the Internet communications that the NSA acquired each year" under Section 702 were obtained through PRISM.¹⁶

Cambridge Analytica and the 2018 and 2019 penalties

On April 10, 2018 Zuckerberg testified at a joint hearing of the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees. He told the committees: "In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app." He said the app was installed by about 300,000 people who agreed to share information about themselves and, through their friends' privacy settings, about their friends, so that Kogan "was able to access some information about tens of millions of their friends." Asked about the episode, Zuckerberg testified: "We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I'm sorry."¹⁷ Zuckerberg also told the committees that in 2014 the company changed its platform "to dramatically limit the Facebook information apps could access," and that "In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica." He testified that the company banned the app and demanded that Kogan and the other entities that received the data, including Cambridge Analytica, certify that they had deleted it.¹⁷ The data passed to the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which the Securities and Exchange Commission later described as a now-defunct advertising and data analytics company.¹⁸

The Information Commissioner's Office of the United Kingdom issued a monetary penalty in October 2018. Its report to Parliament of November 6, 2018 records that "On 25 October 2018, the Information Commissioner issued a monetary penalty notice to Facebook, imposing a fine of £500,000," and describes the amount as "the highest permitted by the DPA1998."¹⁹ The same report found that Facebook "processed the personal information of users unfairly by allowing application developers access to their information, without sufficiently clear and informed consent." It found that the app developed by Kogan and his company harvested data of up to 87 million people worldwide, that the personal information of at least one million UK users was among the harvested data, and that a subset of the data was later shared with other organisations, including Cambridge Analytica.¹⁹ The office also found that Facebook "failed to make suitable checks on apps and developers using its platform," and it stated that the fine "would have been significantly higher had these failings occurred after the GDPR."¹⁹

On July 24, 2019 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged the company with misleading investors about risk. The SEC's release states that "For more than two years, Facebook's public disclosures presented the risk of misuse of user data as merely hypothetical," although the company had discovered in 2015 that a third-party developer had misused user data. The release also says that Cambridge Analytica paid an academic researcher, through a company he controlled, to collect and transfer data from Facebook to create personality scores for approximately 30 million Americans. The release states that "When the company finally did disclose the incident in March 2018, its stock price dropped," and that "Facebook has agreed to pay $100 million to settle the charges."¹⁸ The release also states that Facebook "continued to tell investors that 'our users' data may be improperly accessed, used or disclosed,'" and that when it told reporters investigating Cambridge Analytica that it had discovered "no evidence of wrongdoing," it "reinforced this false impression."¹⁸

The same day the Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement under which the company "will pay a record-breaking $5 billion penalty, and submit to new restrictions and a modified corporate structure." The FTC said the company had "violated a 2012 FTC order by deceiving users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal information." The commission announced separate actions against Cambridge Analytica, its former chief executive Alexander Nix, and Aleksandr Kogan.²⁰ The FTC's release describes the penalty as the largest ever imposed on any company for violating consumers' privacy. The order establishes an independent privacy committee of the board "removing unfettered control by Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg over decisions affecting user privacy," and it requires quarterly certifications of compliance from Zuckerberg and from designated compliance officers.²⁰ The company's 2025 annual report describes the settlement and modified consent order as taking effect in April 2020 with the 5.0 billion dollar penalty, and records a December 2025 settlement of a California consumer-protection suit, subject to court approval.²¹

Palantir and the friend-data project

Nicholas Confessore and Matthew Rosenberg reported in the New York Times on March 27, 2018 that in summer 2014, while Cambridge Analytica was seeking to collect the Facebook data of tens of millions of Americans, the company "received help from at least one employee at Palantir Technologies." According to documents the newspaper obtained, a Palantir employee in London, working closely with the data scientists building the firm's psychological profiling technology, suggested that they create their own mobile-phone personality quiz to reach Facebook users' friend networks. The newspaper named the employee as Alfredas Chmieliauskas, who "works on business development for the company, according to his LinkedIn page."²²

The same report states that beginning in 2013 Chmieliauskas corresponded from a Gmail account with Christopher Wylie and a colleague, both then working for the British contractor SCL Group, which formed Cambridge Analytica with Robert Mercer the next year, and that the three shared Google documents to brainstorm behavioral profiling, a product code-named "Big Daddy." A former SCL intern, Sophie Schmidt, the daughter of Eric Schmidt, urged the company in June 2013 to link up with Palantir; in early 2013 Alexander Nix and a Palantir executive discussed working together on election campaigns, and emails indicated that Nix and Chmieliauskas sought to revive the talks through early 2014. Palantir, which Peter Thiel co-founded in 2003 and whose co-founder was then a member of Facebook's board, first said it had "never had a relationship with Cambridge Analytica, nor have we ever worked on any Cambridge Analytica data." Later the same day it said that "an employee, in 2013-2014, engaged in an entirely personal capacity with people associated with Cambridge Analytica." Wylie told British lawmakers: "There were senior Palantir employees that were also working on the Facebook data." He acknowledged that Palantir and Cambridge Analytica never signed a contract.²² Forbes reported in 2013 that In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, funded Palantir in two rounds "totaling more than $2 million," and that from 2005 to 2008 the CIA was Palantir's patron and only customer.²³

The 2014 emotional-contagion experiment

In June 2014 the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks." The authors were Adam Kramer, of the company's Core Data Science team, and Jamie Guillory and Jeffrey Hancock of Cornell University. The experiment reduced the amount of positive or negative content in the News Feeds of 689,003 users and measured what those users then posted.²⁴ The article's summary of its finding is that "emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness."²⁴

The article states that the research "was consistent with Facebook's Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research."²⁴ The article also states that the scoring of posts ran on a system "such that no text was seen by the researchers."²⁴ A correction and an expression of concern were published for the article in PNAS on July 3, 2014.²⁵

Myanmar

The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, which the United Nations Human Rights Council established, reported on September 12, 2018. Paragraph 74 of its report states: "Facebook has been a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate, in a context where, for most users, Facebook is the Internet." The mission found that "the response of Facebook has been slow and ineffective," and it regretted that the company "is unable to provide country-specific data about the spread of hate speech on its platform."²⁶ The mission also wrote: "The role of social media is significant."²⁶

In December 2021 Rohingya refugees filed a class action against the company in California Superior Court for San Mateo County. The suit seeks "more than $150 billion" and is brought on behalf of anyone worldwide who survived the violence or had a relative who died in it.²⁷ The plaintiffs allege that Facebook arrived in Myanmar in 2011, arranging for millions of residents to access the internet for the first time, and that the company did little to warn users about misinformation and fake accounts.²⁷

Livestreams and foreign influence operations

The Christchurch attacker, Brenton Tarrant, live-streamed his attack on the Al Noor Mosque on Facebook on March 15, 2019. The company's technical update of March 2019 states that "The video was viewed fewer than 200 times during the live broadcast," that the video was viewed "about 4,000 times in total before being removed from Facebook," and that the company had removed the attacker's video "within minutes of the New Zealand Police's outreach to us." The update also says that in the first 24 hours the company removed "more than 1.2 million videos of the attack at upload."²⁸ Approximately 300,000 additional copies were removed after they were posted.²⁸

The indictment of the Internet Research Agency returned in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and filed February 16, 2018 (United States v. Internet Research Agency LLC, Criminal No. 1:18-cr-32) names Facebook in its description of the organization's structure and methods. It alleges that by April 2014 the organization had formed a department known as the "translator project" that "focused on the U.S. population and conducted operations on social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter," and that by July 2016 more than eighty employees were assigned to it.²⁹ The defendants "created thematic group pages on social media sites, particularly on the social media platforms Facebook and Instagram," with group names including "Secured Borders," "Blacktivist," "United Muslims of America," "Army of Jesus," "South United" and "Heart of Texas."²⁹ It describes a Facebook group called "Secured Borders," an account called "Stop A.I.," and Facebook accounts called "Clinton FRAUDation" and "Trumpsters United." From at least April 2016 through November 2016, the indictment alleges, the defendants bought political advertisements on United States social media, paid for them from Russian bank accounts and cards registered in the names of fictitious American personas and also through PayPal accounts, and did not report the expenditures to the Federal Election Commission.³⁰ The Facebook groups "United Muslims of America" and "Being Patriotic" are alleged to have been used to promote rallies in the District of Columbia and New York in June and July 2016, and Facebook advertisements for a "Florida Goes Trump" rally on August 4, 2016 are alleged to have reached over 59,000 Facebook users in Florida, of whom over 8,300 responded.³⁰

The same indictment records Facebook's September 6, 2017 disclosure that it had identified Russian expenditures on political and social advertisements and had "shared [its] findings with US authorities investigating these issues," and alleges that after the disclosure the defendants destroyed evidence.³¹

The indictment of twelve officers of the GRU returned on July 13, 2018 (United States v. Netyksho, Criminal No. 1:18-cr-215) alleges that on June 8, 2016, at about the time the dcleaks.com website was launched, the conspirators "created a DCLeaks Facebook page using a preexisting social media account under the fictitious name 'Alice Donovan,'" and that they used accounts in the names of fictitious U.S. persons such as "Jason Scott" and "Richard Gingrey" to promote the site. It states that the conspirators created the Twitter account @dcleaks_ the same day.³²

A November 12, 2025 response to a USPTO office action filed for ENNEA LLC, which describes itself as linked to Sky Watcher, included as evidence a Facebook post dated January 28, 2025 by an account called "Disclosure Team." The post's text describes ENNEA as "a sister organization to Skywatcher."³³

The Royal Commission on the Christchurch attack

The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Attack on Christchurch Mosques on 15 March 2019 reported on December 8, 2020 and described the attacker, whom the report calls "the individual," in its volume on his background. The report states that he became a Facebook member in 2013, that "the individual's history on Facebook is erratic," that he deleted data and friends and did not post for six months in 2018, and that he held "a number of Facebook accounts over the last few years, randomly closing one down and creating a new one."³⁴ Between April 2016 and early 2017 he made approximately 30 comments on the Facebook page of the Australian group United Patriots Front, which had more than 120,000 followers; the report states that the group's page was removed by Facebook in May 2017, after which former members formed The Lads Society.³⁵ In 2017 he joined The Lads Society's Facebook group under the username "Barry Harry Tarry," and its private second-season group, in which he made his first post on September 19, 2017. He left the group on April 9, 2018 and six days later deleted 134 Facebook friends, including those made through it.³⁴

The report states that on March 11, 2019 he saved to his phone walk-through video of Masjid an-Nur taken from a public Facebook page, posted by a Muslim visitor to New Zealand with family travel photographs and unconnected to the far right; that on March 13, 2019 he created a Facebook album titled "Open in case of Saracens" containing 155 images and two videos; and that at 12:19 pm on March 15, 2019 he searched on his phone for his own Facebook account, "likely to check his profile was publicly viewable so that the livestream could be viewed by an audience."³⁶ The Commission recorded the answers of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service and a senior New Zealand Police counter-terrorism officer when asked what they would have done had his "Barry Harry Tarry" posts come to their attention: the agency said it would have "assessed the posts as not threatening violence and with a marginal connection to national security," and the officer said they would have seen the posts "as posing limited risk due to the absence of an explicit threat." The report adds that the agencies "did not have the capability or probably the legal authority to monitor social media activity on the scale necessary" to find usernames of that kind, and, in a separate passage on New Zealand's June 2020 Cabinet decision to pursue accession to the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime (the Budapest Convention), that the treaty framework facilitates cooperation on "private social media communications relating to a crime and stored in the cloud by companies such as Facebook."³⁷

Child safety reporting

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported that its CyberTipline received 36.2 million reports in 2023 and 20.5 million in 2024. The center attributed part of the 2024 decline to a bundling feature implemented by Meta Platforms that year, which consolidates reports tied to a single viral event into one or a smaller set of reports. NCMEC also stated that its Case Management Tool, which it uses to share reports with law enforcement, was developed with support from Meta.³⁸

The center's annual tables of reports by electronic service provider list the Meta platforms separately. For 2022 they show 21,165,208 reports from Facebook, 5,007,902 from Instagram and 1,017,555 from WhatsApp, within 31,802,525 reports from providers in all.³⁹ For 2023 they show 17,838,422 from Facebook, 11,430,007 from Instagram and 1,389,618 from WhatsApp, within 35,944,826, against 1,470,958 from Google.⁴⁰ For 2024 they show 8,590,357 from Facebook, 3,320,008 from Instagram and 1,851,086 from WhatsApp, within 20,348,306.⁴¹

Law-enforcement and research sources on the network known as The Com list Instagram and Facebook among the platforms of initial contact with targets. Investigations of individual offenders also reach the company's records. In the Iowa State University Police Department investigation that produced the case against Clint Borge, subpoenas were issued to electronic service providers including Google, PayPal, Venmo, Instagram and Facebook.⁴² The Internet Watch Foundation's member list shows Meta among the members in the tier contributing over 90,000 pounds, with membership dated from December 2009.⁴³

Whistleblower testimony

On April 9, 2025 the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled "A Time for Truth: Oversight of Meta's Foreign Relations and Representations to the United States Congress."⁴⁴ The witness, Sarah Wynn-Williams, testified that she had been "Director of Global Public Policy at Facebook, now Meta, for nearly seven years starting in 2011." She said the company's China project was called "Project Aldrin" and "was restricted to need-to-know staff," and she said the company had worked "hand in glove" with the Chinese Communist Party to build and test censorship tools.⁴⁵

She told the committee that "they began offering products and services in China as early as 2014," and that "Meta started briefing the Chinese Communist Party as early as 2015." She described China as "Meta's second biggest market," citing the company's own SEC filings, and she wrote that Meta's Llama model "has contributed significantly to Chinese advances in AI technologies like DeepSeek."⁴⁵⁴⁶ She also wrote that she had filed a shareholder resolution asking the board to investigate the company's activity in China, and that she had filed whistleblower complaints with the SEC and the DOJ.⁴⁵

Her testimony also addressed the legal order that the company obtained against her. She wrote that she had relied on a 2018 public commitment by the company to waive its rights to pursue forced arbitration. "Despite that public commitment, they brought a case against me for hundreds of millions of dollars," she said. She described the resulting order as "so expansive that it prohibits me from speaking with Members of Congress," and wrote: "This order silences me even as Meta and their proxies spread lies about me."⁴⁵

Acquisitions and the 2021 rename

In February 2014 Facebook announced that it would acquire WhatsApp, a messaging company, "for a total of approximately $16 billion," including cash and Facebook shares.⁴⁷ On March 25, 2014 it announced that it would acquire Oculus VR, the virtual-reality company, "for a total of approximately $2 billion."⁴⁸ Oculus's founder, Palmer Luckey, later left the company. The Wall Street Journal reported in November 2018 that he had been fired in March 2017 over a political donation.⁴⁹

The company's 2021 rename was announced under the headline "The Facebook Company Is Now Meta."¹

In May 2025 a federal jury in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California returned a verdict in the suit that WhatsApp brought against the Israeli spyware maker NSO Group. After a six-day trial the jury ordered NSO to pay $167,254,000 in punitive damages and $444,719 in compensatory damages. The law firm that reported the verdict on its website called it the "first jury verdict against a commercial spyware company in U.S. court."⁵⁰

Artificial intelligence and the Scale AI investment

The company's annual report for 2025 states that it is innovating in artificial intelligence "to advance our vision to deliver personal superintelligence for everyone," defines superintelligence as "AI that surpasses human intelligence," and describes a history of open-sourcing that includes releasing the Llama foundation models while stating that it expects "to continue training a combination of open and closed models going forward." The report gives a headcount of 78,865 at December 31, 2025, family daily active people of 3.58 billion for December 2025, and capital expenditures of 72.22 billion dollars for the year.²¹ It also states that Zuckerberg, as founder, chairman and chief executive, is able to exercise a majority of the voting power through Class B stock carrying ten votes per share.²¹

On June 12, 2025 Scale AI announced "a significant new investment from Meta Platforms, Inc." that valued Scale at over 29 billion dollars, and that its founder Alexandr Wang "is joining Meta to work on Meta's AI efforts" while remaining a Scale director; Jason Droege became interim chief executive.⁵¹ The company's quarterly report for the period ended June 30, 2025 says that it acquired "a non-voting minority of its outstanding equity," and that "$13.79 billion was included in non-marketable equity investments."⁵² In June 2025 Meta also attempted to acquire Safe Superintelligence, the laboratory cofounded by Ilya Sutskever; CNBC reported that Sutskever rebuffed the approach, that Meta instead hired the laboratory's chief executive, Daniel Gross, and Nat Friedman in a transaction in which Meta took a stake in their NFDG fund, and that Sutskever became chief executive of Safe Superintelligence on July 3, 2025.⁵³

The company appears among the corporate supporters of two Washington policy organizations active on artificial intelligence. The Center for a New American Security lists Meta in the tier of contributions of 100,000 to 249,999 dollars for October 1, 2024 to September 30, 2025, and the Foundation for American Innovation lists Meta among its corporate supporters and event sponsors alongside Anthropic and OpenAI.⁵⁴⁵⁵

Policy leadership and the January 2025 changes

On January 2, 2025 the company named Joel Kaplan as its policy chief, replacing Nick Clegg. Kaplan had been a Facebook vice president for global public policy, and the change was reported as the appointment of a former Republican staffer ahead of the inauguration of Donald Trump.⁵⁶ CNBC reported that Kaplan had served as a deputy chief of staff to George W. Bush.⁵⁷

On January 6, 2025 Meta announced that Dana White, president and chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, John Elkann, chief executive of Exor, and Charlie Songhurst had been elected to its board of directors. Zuckerberg said the three would "add a depth of expertise and perspective that will help us tackle the massive opportunities ahead with AI, wearables and the future of human connection," and White said: "I've never been interested in joining a board of directors until I got the offer to join Meta's board."⁵⁸ On January 7, 2025 Kaplan announced in the company newsroom that "Starting in the US, we are ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to a Community Notes model," and that the trust and safety teams that write the content policies and review content would move "out of California to Texas and other US locations."⁵⁹ The Texas Tribune reported the same day that the company was moving the moderators as Zuckerberg sought to mend ties with the incoming Trump administration, and noted that in July 2024 the company had paid the State of Texas 1.4 billion dollars to settle a lawsuit over the use of biometric data without users' authorization.⁶⁰ The company's 2025 annual report describes that July 2024 settlement as resolving a Texas suit over the "tag suggestions" feature and other uses of facial recognition technology.²¹

The August 2015 dinner at Palo Alto

A restaurant confirmation email dated July 31, 2015, produced in the Justice Department's Epstein library, describes a dinner at 6 pm on Sunday, August 2, 2015 at Baume in Palo Alto, for which the restaurant had been bought out so that "it will just be our group." The attendee list names Ed Boyden, Reid Hoffman, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, Peter Thiel, Jeffrey Epstein and Elon Musk among eleven numbered places. A reply in the thread, which begins "replace one with Joi Ito," repeats the list with Joi Ito added.⁶¹ Fortune reported in 2026 that Epstein wrote to the financier Thomas Pritzker on August 20, 2015, "i had dinner with zuckerburg, mu=k, thiel hoffman, wild," and that he emailed himself a photograph from a gathering, both of which surfaced in the releases under the Epstein Files Transparency Act; the dinner had first been reported by Vanity Fair in 2019.⁶² A Meta spokesman stated in 2019 that Zuckerberg "met Epstein in passing one time at a dinner" and "did not communicate with Epstein again." Hoffman apologized in September 2019 for his part in fundraising at which Epstein was present.⁶³

Dustin Moskovitz and the grantmaking foundations

Dustin Moskovitz, who held senior roles at Facebook from February 2004 to November 2008, cofounded Asana. With his wife, Cari Tuna, he established Good Ventures, which funds Open Philanthropy. Forbes reported in November 2025 on the couple's plan to give away a fortune built on Facebook stock.⁶⁴

Other executives and linked figures

Adam D'Angelo held senior roles at Facebook from June 2005 to June 2008, and was its chief technology officer from November 2006.⁶⁵ Bret Taylor served as chief technology officer of Facebook from August 2009 to July 2012.⁶⁶ Chamath Palihapitiya joined Facebook in 2007 as vice president of growth, mobile and international, and left in 2011.⁶⁷

The Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies announced on February 12, 2024 that Sarah Pollack would be its director of tech policy and strategy. The announcement describes her as having led communications for Meta's global counter-terrorism and violent extremism program.⁶⁸

In May 2013 the journalist James Kirchick wrote in The Spectator that the rental service Toucan Apartments, run by Warwick Spinks, had registered a Facebook page on April 12, 2013.⁶⁹

Forbes called Zuckerberg the "most famous client and the key to his success" of Divesh Makan, and wrote that Makan met him in 2004 when Makan was a broker at Goldman Sachs. The magazine named among the other clients of Makan's firm ICONIQ Capital "Facebook's Dustin Moskovitz and Sheryl Sandberg."⁷⁰ The Horowitz Family Foundation's return for the year ended June 2021 lists gifts of Facebook shares among its contributions.⁷¹ The facial-recognition company Clearview AI built its image database by automated scraping of public-facing images from platforms including Facebook and Instagram, which the platforms' terms of service prohibited.⁷² The LinkedIn profile of Abdulrahman Alfozan lists him as a senior systems engineer at Meta Platforms from 2017 to 2022.⁷³