Social media platforms enable communal activity, helping people connect and build networks. Users access social media through web-based or mobile applications. These interactive platforms allow individuals, communities, businesses, and organizations to share, co-create, discuss, participate in, and modify user-generated or self-curated content. Social media is used to share memories, form friendships, build communities, and learn. They may also be used to promote people, companies, products, and ideas, and to consume, publish, or share news.
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.
Social media outlets differ from old media like newspapers, TV, and radio broadcasting in various ways, including quality, reach, frequency, usability, relevancy, and permanence. Social media operates in a dialogic transmission system, with many sources to many receivers, unlike traditional media's monologic model.
Early computing systems offered precursors to social media features. The PLATO system, launched in 1960, included innovations such as Notes (a message-forum application), TERM-talk (an instant-messaging feature), Talkomatic (an online chat room), News Report (a crowdsourced online newspaper), and Access Lists. ARPANET, online in 1969, enabled the exchange of non-government/business ideas by the late 1970s. Usenet, conceived in 1979, was the first open social media app, established in 1980.
The Community Memory system, a precursor to the electronic bulletin board system (BBS), appeared by 1973. Mainstream BBSs arrived with the Computer Bulletin Board System in Chicago in 1978. Companies like CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL were among the largest BBS companies and migrated 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, aided by digital cameras and camera phones.
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, featuring 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.
Social media encompasses an expanding suite of services, including blogs (e.g., HuffPost, Boing Boing), business networks (e.g., LinkedIn, XING), collaborative projects (e.g., Mozilla, GitHub), enterprise social networks (e.g., Yammer, Socialcast, Slack), forums (e.g., Gaia Online, IGN), microblogs (e.g., Twitter, Tumblr, Weibo), photo sharing (e.g., Pinterest, Flickr, Photobucket), products/services review (e.g., Amazon, Upwork), social bookmarking (e.g., Delicious, Pinterest), social gaming including MMORPGs (e.g., Fortnite, World of Warcraft), social networks (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Baidu Tieba, VK, QZone, ShareChat, WeChat, LINE), video sharing (e.g., YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo), and virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life, Twinity). Some services offer more than one type of service.
As an instance of technological convergence, various social media platforms have 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 quarter-minute 640×640 pixel videos, later extended to a minute with increased resolution. Instagram later implemented stories, a concept popularized by Snapchat, and 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, after YouTube's Creator Studio. 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. As of 2023, as many as 4.76 billion people used social media, some 59% of the global population. 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.
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.
Social media can offer a support system for adolescent health, allowing them to mobilize around health issues. For example, in a clinical study among adolescent patients undergoing obesity treatment, participants claimed that social media allowed them to access personalized weight-loss content and social support. However, social media typically has no mechanism for ensuring the quality of health information. The National Eating Disorders Association reported a high correlation between weight loss content and disorderly eating among women influenced by inaccurate content. Social media such as pro-anorexia sites reportedly increase the risk of harm by reinforcing damaging health-related behaviors, especially among adolescents.
During the coronavirus pandemic, inaccurate information from all sides spread widely via social media. Topics subject to distortion included treatments, avoiding infection, vaccination, and public policy. Simultaneously, governments and others influenced social media platforms to suppress both accurate and inaccurate information in support of public policy. Heavier social media use was reportedly associated with more acceptance of conspiracy theories, leading to worse mental health and less compliance with public health recommendations.
Social media platforms can serve as a breeding ground for addiction-related behaviors, with studies reporting that excessive use can lead to addiction-like symptoms. These symptoms include compulsive checking, mood modification, and withdrawal when not using social media, which can result in decreased face-to-face social interactions and contribute to the deterioration of interpersonal relationships and a sense of loneliness.
A 2017 study reported a link between sleep disturbance and the use of social media. It concluded that blue light from computer/phone displays and the frequency, rather than the duration, of time spent predicted disturbed sleep, termed "obsessive 'checking'." The association between social media use and sleep disturbance has clinical ramifications for young adults. Females were more likely to experience high levels of sleep disturbance. Many teenagers suffer from sleep deprivation from long hours at night on their phones, leaving them tired and unfocused in school.
One studied effect of social media is 'Facebook depression,' which affects adolescents who spend too much time on social media. This may lead to reclusiveness, increasing loneliness and low self-esteem. Social media curates content to encourage users to keep scrolling. Studies report children's self-esteem is positively affected by positive comments and negatively affected by negative or lack of comments. A 2017 study of almost 6,000 adolescent students reported that those who self-reported addiction-like symptoms of social media use were more likely to report low self-esteem and high levels of depressive symptoms.
A second emotional effect is social media burnout, defined as ambivalence, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization. A third emotional effect is "fear of missing out" (FOMO), which is the "pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent." It is associated with increased scrutiny of friends on social media. Social media can also offer support, as Twitter has done for the medical community, facilitating academic discussion and providing a supportive community.
In Australia, in November 2024, the federal government passed the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, banning people under the age of 16 from using most social media platforms, effective December 2025. The ban applies to many major social media platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter, but exempts platforms meeting educational or health needs, such as YouTube and Google Classroom.
In Egypt, on 27 July 2020, two women were sentenced to two years of imprisonment for posting TikTok videos, which the government claimed as "violating family values." In the 2014 Thai coup d'état, the public was explicitly instructed not to 'share' or 'like' dissenting views on social media or face prison.
In the United States, the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230, exempted internet platforms from legal liability for content authored by third parties. In 2024, legislation was enacted in Florida requiring social media companies to verify the age of people with accounts, prohibiting accounts for those under 14, and requiring parental approval for those aged 14 to 16.
The European Union enacted the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in July 2022. The DSA entered into force on February 17, 2024, and the DMA in March 2024. This legislation aims to ensure that "what is illegal offline must also be illegal online," requiring very large online platforms to delete illegal content, redesign systems for privacy and protection of minors, and prohibit advertising based on sensitive personal data.
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