Social media platforms enable users to create and share content and participate in social networking. Common features include user-generated content such as text posts, comments, digital photos, or videos, and data generated through online interactions. Service-specific profiles are designed and maintained by the social media organization. Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.
The term "social" in regard to media suggests platforms enable communal activity. Users access social media through web-based or mobile applications. A 2015 review identified four unique features of social media services: Web 2.0 Internet-based applications, user-generated content, user-created self-profiles, and social networks formed by connections between profiles, such as followers, groups, and lists. In 2019, Merriam-Webster defined social media as "forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)."
Popular social media platforms with over 100 million registered users include Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, ShareChat, Instagram, Pinterest, QZone, Weibo, VK, Tumblr, Baidu Tieba, Threads, and LinkedIn. Other popular platforms sometimes referred to as social media services include YouTube, Letterboxd, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, LINE, Snapchat, Viber, Reddit, Discord, and TikTok. Wikis and Roblox are examples of collaborative content creation.
Early computing systems offered forms of social media features. The PLATO system, launched in 1960, included innovations such as Notes, its message-forum application; TERM-talk, its instant-messaging feature; Talkomatic, an early online chat room; News Report, a crowdsourced online newspaper; and Access Lists. ARPANET, which came online in 1969, enabled the exchange of non-government/business ideas and communication by the late 1970s. ARPANET evolved into the Internet in the 1990s. Usenet, conceived in 1979, was established in 1980 as the first open social media app.
A precursor of the electronic bulletin board system (BBS), known as Community Memory, appeared by 1973. Mainstream BBSs arrived with the Computer Bulletin Board System in Chicago, which launched on February 16, 1978. CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL were among the largest BBS companies and were the first to migrate to the Internet in the 1990s. Message forums were a signature BBS phenomenon throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.
In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee integrated HTML hypertext software with the Internet, creating the World Wide Web. This led to an explosion of blogs, list servers, and email services. Message forums migrated to the web and evolved into Internet forums. These early text-based systems expanded to include images and video in the 21st century.
Social media started in the mid-1990s with platforms like Classmates.com and SixDegrees.com. SixDegrees was unique as the first online service designed for people to connect using their actual names, boasting features like profiles, friends lists, and school affiliations. In the early 2000s, social media platforms gained widespread popularity with BlackPlanet (1999) preceding Friendster and Myspace, followed by Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
As an instance of technological convergence, various social media platforms adapted functionality beyond their original scope, increasingly overlapping with each other. For example, Facebook launched an integrated video platform in May 2007. Instagram, originally for low-resolution photo sharing, introduced the ability to share videos, and later implemented stories, a concept popularized by Snapchat, as well as IGTV for seekable videos. Stories were then adopted by YouTube.
X, whose original scope was text-based microblogging, later adopted photo sharing, then video sharing, then a media studio for business users. The discussion platform Reddit added an integrated image hoster, replacing Imgur, and then an internal video hosting service, followed by image galleries. Imgur also implemented video sharing. YouTube rolled out a Community feature for sharing text-only posts and polls.
Research from 2015 reported that globally, users spent 22% of their online time on social networks, likely fueled by the availability of smartphones. According to Statista, it is estimated that, in 2022, around 3.96 billion people were using social media globally, up from 3.6 billion in 2020. As of 2023, as many as 4.76 billion people used social media, some 59% of the global population.
Social media has been criticized for a range of negative impacts on children and teenagers, including exposure to inappropriate content, exploitation by adults, sleep problems, attention problems, feelings of exclusion, and various mental health maladies. It has also received criticism as worsening political polarization and undermining democracy, exacerbated by platform capture by vested interests. Journalist Maria Ressa deemed it "toxic sludge" for increasing distrust among members of society.
Major news outlets often have strong controls in place to avoid and fix false claims, but social media's unique qualities bring viral content with little to no oversight. Algorithms that track user engagement tend to favor content that spurs negative emotions like anger and outrage. Most online misinformation originates from a small minority of "superspreaders," but social media amplifies their reach and influence.
This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule.