Social Media

Social media took the internet by storm in the 2000s. By the 2020s, billions of people around the world used social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, and X. Other social media applications include blogs, videos, and audio podcasts. Over time, social media has become used for marketing and as an alternative news source. Although the aim of social media is to make it easier for individuals to communicate and engage in conversations, many argue that it has led to a reduction in human interaction.

The idea of social media began in the mid-to-late-1990s, when internet users were first given the ability to make their own websites through servers such as Geocities. Blogging and social networks also began around that time. Sixdegrees.com, launched in 1997, was one of the first websites that allowed users to create a profile and add lists of friends. It was not until 2002 and the launch of Friendster that the concept of a social network become highly popular. Within three months of its launch, Friendster had gained three million users. Other popular social media applications launched around this time include the social networking platforms MySpace and LinkedIn, the music service iTunes, and the image-hosting website Flickr.

Social media is classified in several ways. Any application that allows users to create a profile and build a friend list is considered a social network. The most popular example of this is Facebook, which was launched in 2004 and had grown to more than 2.96 billion monthly active users by January 2023. Blogs allow users to generate a variety of content for publication on the internet. Several websites are devoted to hosting users’ blogs; one of the most popular of these servers is WordPress. Forums are another classification that allows users to voice their opinion on a range of topics. Video and audio podcasts allow users to record themselves discussing different topics. Internet users can then download or stream these recordings. Collaborative websites known as "wikis," which allow users to generate informational content on a variety of topics, also became very popular; the most famous of these is Wikipedia, a crowdsourced encyclopedia.

Multiplayer online games are also a prevalent type of social media. These games, such as the popular World of Warcraft, allow users to communicate with other players while participating in a virtual world. Other popular examples of these games are The Sims and Second Life, which allowed users to create avatars and interact with other users. Other more general categories that can be considered social media include emails, instant messaging, and video sharing. Many of these varieties have been aggregated with social networks.

The rise in smartphone and tablet computer technology allowed individuals to access an array of social media applications while mobile. Geographic tagging applications allowed users to "tag" themselves at specific locations such as restaurants and stores and post these tags on social media websites such as Facebook and Foursquare.

By the late 2010s, many social media platforms had banned hate speech. Several platforms like Telegram, Parler, and Gab, however, did not, and so became popular with right-wing extremist groups who used the sites to communicate and organize events. Such sites were used to coordinate the January 6, 2021, storming of the US Capitol building in Washington, DC.

Following the storming of the Capitol, many mainstream social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and X, temporarily banned President Donald Trump for allegedly inciting the violent event. (Trump, the Republican nominee for president in 2024, was allowed back onto X in 2023, and onto Facebook and Instagram in 2024.) The sites also banned many more users who violated their rules against hate speech and inciting violence.

Facebook and MySpace

One of the most popular social media and networking tools in the world is Facebook. The website was launched on February 4, 2004, by computer programmer and Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg. When the website was first created, it was exclusively for students of Harvard University and others with college-based email addresses. It was opened to everyone on September 26, 2006, and quickly gained hundreds of millions of users.

Facebook allows users to build a personal profile that includes pictures and cultural interests, to exchange messages, and to share thoughts, pictures, and videos. The website initially drew comparisons with MySpace, an earlier social networking website. However, Facebook allows for more customization and requires users to give their true identity, which MySpace did not. By 2023, Facebook remained one of the most popular social media platforms in the US, with 68 percent of American adults using the service. New functions and updates continued to be added to the platform, which was rebranded under the new company name Meta in 2021. In 2023, the company announced it was launching the Threads application, aimed at competing with Twitter, which had become increasingly volatile under Elon Musk's ownership.

MySpace was launched in August 2003, and quickly became one of the most visited websites in the United States. It was surpassed by Facebook in 2008 but, in 2015, it still had 50 million users. The website shifted its focus to cater heavily to musicians and was revamped to make it easy for users to upload and share music from established and upcoming artists. However, by 2020, competition and a 2019 report that a server migration initiative had resulted in the loss of a significant amount of early user data meant that the site had continued to fail to attract new users.

X (Twitter)

The social networking and microblogging website Twitter (known as X since 2023) rose to immense popularity after web-developer Jack Dorsey launched it in 2006. It allows users to create a small profile, follow other users, and post brief messages, originally restricted to 140 characters long. These messages are known as "tweets." X further encourages interaction and online conversations through the use of hashtags. A hashtag, represented by the pound symbol before a word or group of words, allows users to search for and view every tweet with that specific hashtag attached. The most popular current hashtags are known as "trending topics." By mid-2020 had around 186 million active monthly users, with hundreds of millions of tweets being sent every day from computers and various mobile devices.

The application is significant for the way it allows people to organize quickly. For example, Twitter was used to rally individuals for political protests around the world, as in the Egyptian Revolution in 2011. Politicians utilized it as a way to garner support and interact with voters. US president Barack Obama used it heavily during his 2008 campaign. He encouraged voters to ask him questions via Twitter and Facebook throughout the campaign. This innovative use was expanded to an unprecedented level by Donald Trump, who used his personal Twitter account as a main form of communication during his successful presidential campaign in 2016. During his presidency, he continued to use the platform heavily to express his views to the public, and it became particularly prominent again throughout the 2020 presidential campaign.

Twitter has also been used to report breaking news, although many critics argue that Twitter users rarely perform fact checking before sending out news tweets. For example, during the 2016 US presidential election Twitter served as a highly influential news source for millions of Americans, but it and other social media sites were plagued by accounts spreading misleading or outright false news and analysis. Twitter has also been frequently used in police investigations, education, and public relations.

In October 2022, Twitter was sold to billionaire Elon Musk. Despite complaints of jobs cuts, poor management, broken technology, and safety issues, Twitter remained high in use, with around 450 million monthly active users in 2023. In August 2023, Musk announced a rebranding of the social media site, changing its name to X. In 2024, X remained one of the world's most-visited websites.

Social Media Marketing

Since social media is accessible through a broad range of applications, it has become a heavily used tool in marketing. Companies can manufacture advertisements that social media users can easily share at no cost to the company, making it an inexpensive alternative to traditional marketing. Additionally, by 2020 many businesses and brands had begun taking advantage of influencer marketing, which typically entailed the involvement of individuals with a large number of social media followers.

Social networking sites such as Facebook allow companies to join them and create a profile for marketing purposes. On Facebook, users can "like" the page of companies to get updates and offers from them, as well as communicate with them. This approach was especially successful for small businesses that used Facebook to promote their brand through special events and offers.

Brands utilize Twitter to market and interact on a more individual level. When users "follow" brands online, short messages posted by the brand appear on the users' main Twitter feed page. Many times these messages include links that a user can click on to learn more about offers and specific products. This too is a very inexpensive method of online marketing.

Foursquare was another influential social media application frequently used by businesses in online marketing. This application originally allowed users to "check-in" at the location of a store, restaurant, or other business. Their check-in was then posted on the Foursquare website as well as on other applications such as Facebook. Businesses encouraged return customers by offering incentives for checking in many times. While Foursquare itself eventually abandoned this model in favor of focusing on personalized, localized search services, the "check-in" concept was taken up by other social media applications.

The video-sharing website YouTube became another popular place for advertisers. Marketing on YouTube is personalized through various language-detection programs that analyze users’ individual interests and market to them accordingly. Advertisers can attach specific advertisements to relevant videos being searched, making it easy for them to reach a target audience. Another popular method of no- or low-cost advertising on YouTube is through "viral videos." These videos, which are oftentimes humorous and culturally relevant, are created with the goal of having users spread them organically across the web.

Other popular social media applications that are heavily used in marketing are blogs where advertisements can be posted, business-profile websites such as Yelp, and the business-networking website LinkedIn.

Privacy Concerns

One of the biggest debates concerning social media remains over online privacy and protection of user information. Those concerned with these issues argue that social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter do not take the proper steps to protect the information users share with each other. Debates have looked at ownership of the content on social networking websites. Users generate it onto these websites, but corporations own the websites.

In November 2007, Facebook came under heavy criticism for implementing Beacon, a system that allowed partner websites to send information concerning the actions of Facebook users on their own websites. This information included items purchased at online retailers and games users played online. Beacon aroused concerns over privacy of information and users’ lack of control over how their information was used. Facebook spokespersons argued that it allowed users to further share their interests with friends and help refer them to online retailers. Beacon was discontinued in September 2009, but the company came under similar scrutiny in 2014 for major privacy policy changes as well as for an emotion study that drew the attention and ire of privacy watchdog organizations and individuals.

There also have been concerns over federal and local authorities using Facebook to acquire personal information in the investigation of crimes. Facebook’s privacy policy states that they may turn over any information they believe may be related to an illegal or criminal activity, but many argued that personal information has been harvested even when authorities lacked reasonable suspicion. This has raised further questions about what online information falls under the US Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986, which regulates what electronic messages and information can be legally seized or intercepted by authorities. Critics argue that the bill is very loose in its language and outdated with respect to contemporary information sharing.

The concept of data mining to extract user information has been another serious concern for social network users. Many worry that companies and individuals have been allowed to freely harvest information and use it for various purposes without necessarily obtaining the consent of users. In 2005, as part of a project on Facebook privacy, two students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) demonstrated the possibility of simple data mining on Facebook. They used an automated script to download the Facebook profiles of over seventy thousand users.

Facebook has since developed higher security methods for their users, including customizable security, but privacy continued to be a concern. Challenges of Facebook's operations and policies were heightened once more in 2018 when it was revealed that the political data firm Cambridge Analytica had been able to harvest a large amount of user data from the site without their knowledge. In early 2020, the platform made concerted efforts to emphasize the importance of information privacy.

Impact

Since its inception, social media has changed everything from politics to public relations, from telecommunications to theater. It has fundamentally shifted the way many people experience everyday life, including friendship, shopping, and job searching. While it helps connect people and share their ideas, it continues to come under heavy negative criticism and skepticism. Critics argue that it only creates the illusion of connection and in reality decreases the need for actual human interaction. They point to studies that show the correlation between social media use and rates of depression and anxiety, especially in teenagers. Others state that it leads to an increase in cyberbullying, in which people are harassed on social networks. Many employers have banned social media at work due to concerns that it decreases productivity. The ultimate concern is now one of privacy and the misuse of personal information. Yet supporters of social media claim that these downsides are far outweighed by the social and economic benefits of increased interaction over the internet, a field with ever-growing potential as technology and access improves around the world. For better or worse, social media continues to increase in popularity, particularly with the rise and influx of mobile applications.

In 2020 and 2021, during the global COVID-19 pandemic, many people turned increasingly to social media platforms to stay connected while in-person contact was limited in an effort to slow the spread of the virus. Applications like TikTok, where users share short videos, Instagram, and Snapchat skyrocketed in popularity, becoming especially popular among users under thirty years old, who generally preferred those platforms to Facebook. Some of these applications, such as Instagram, were owned by Facebook's parent company, Meta. Other popular platforms in the 2020s included the image-sharing site Pinterest; WhatsApp, a messaging service especially popular among Hispanic users; the community discussion website Reddit; and the neighborhood-focused platform NextDoor.

In 2023, United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory about the effects of social media use on youth mental health. According to the advisory, although social media use could be beneficial, it also had the potential to harm the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents and had not been proven safe.

By the following year, Murthy characterized social media as a contributing factor in the mental health crisis among young people. In a June 2024 opinion piece for the New York Times, he wrote, "Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms, and the average daily use in this age group, as of the summer of 2023, was 4.8 hours." He also cited a 2022 survey that showed nearly half of adolescent participants said that social media made them feel bad about their own bodies. For these reasons, Murthy stated that he had asked Congress to require social media platforms to display warning labels, similar to those found on cigarette packaging, explaining the health risks social media use poses to young people. Murthy acknowledged that a warning label on its own would not be enough to make social media safe for younger users, but said that it could increase awareness and change behavior.

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