Facebook’s Zuckerberg named Time’s Person of the Year

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has become the second-youngest person to be named Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Zuckerberg announced the news Wednesday on — where else? — Facebook, the juggernaut social media website that has more than 500 million users worldwide.

“Being named as Time Person of the Year is a real honor and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected,” Zuckerberg said on his Facebook fan page. “I’m happy to be a part of that.”

At 26 years old, Zuckerberg is the youngest person to be named Time’s Person of the Year since aviator Charles Lindbergh, who was 25 when he was the magazine’s Man of the Year in 1927.

Time said Zuckerberg was chosen “for connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives.”

The magazine also noted that “The Zuck” donated $100 million to schools in Newark, N.J., this year and “weathered the potential backlash of that not-so-little movie,” a reference to “The Social Network,” which portrayed him as having turned friends into enemies as Facebook rose to prominence.

Among the runners-up were WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the once-trapped Chilean miners and the “tea party” movement.

nathan.olivarezgiles@latimes.com