Meta Platforms (Social-Media Platform, 2004)

Class card for Meta Platforms Inc. (formerly Facebook Inc.), the dominant DM-Day social-media and behavioral-advertising machine founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz at Harvard in February 2004. TheFacebook launched 2004-02-04; public registration September 2006; IPO May 2012 ($38/share; $16B raised). Meta's operational target is maximum daily active users → advertising ARPU maximization via behavioral prediction: 3.3B daily active people across the family of apps (2024). The machine operates as a flywheel: user attention and behavioral data feed algorithmic optimization, which attracts more advertisers, which funds user-feature investment, which attracts more users. Four product-era pivots confirm high plasticity: (1) Facebook core social graph 2004-2012; (2) Instagram acquisition April 2012 ($1B) — photo-sharing pivot; (3) WhatsApp acquisition February 2014 ($19B) — messaging pivot; (4) Reels 2020 — short-video counter-TikTok pivot. Meta rebrand October 2021 + metaverse pivot (fade by 2023). Apple ATT IDFA deprecation 2021 → ~$10B/yr ad-revenue loss (structural stress). Llama-1 open-weights February 2023; Llama-3 April 2024; AI-glasses Ray-Ban Meta 2023. Cambridge Analytica scandal March 2018 (~87M users' data). FTC v. Meta antitrust trial 2024-2025. dm_current = late_modernity: Meta exhibits the energetic-zombie pathology — 3.3B captive daily active users and $130B+/yr ad revenue, but evolutionary intelligence hollowed post-Cambridge-Analytica: the machine generates massive engagement while its ability to innovate structurally (vs. copying competitors: Instagram←Pinterest, Stories←Snapchat, Reels←TikTok) declines. The Apple ATT shock revealed structural vulnerability of the behavioral-prediction flywheel. Cross-era sublimation: Meta's personalized algorithmic feed renders the broadcast OPP — the shared public news agenda of newspapers and TV — phenomenologically irrelevant for daily information consumption by ~2012. Motor = flywheel (two-sided platform network effect; the atlas push annotation reflects the DM small-scale-force character but flywheel is the accurate mechanical description). V2.5 GAP: motor atlas seed says push; card authors flywheel per §B.9 rule for two-sided platforms.