Meta owns Facebook, the social-networking platform founded in 2004.
Facebook was launched by Mark Zuckerberg and fellow Harvard students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes in February 2004. It initially served Harvard students before expanding to other universities, schools, and eventually the general public.
The parent company changed its corporate name from Facebook, Inc. to Meta Platforms, Inc. in October 2021. The new name reflected the company’s stated interest in building the metaverse, while Facebook remained the name of its social-networking service.
Meta also owns Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Facebook and Meta are therefore related but not interchangeable answers: Facebook is a product and brand, whereas Meta Platforms is the publicly traded parent company.