Detailed · 12 events
A History of Social Media
2000s
Myspace (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (released by copyright holder) · Commons ↗ Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe launched MySpace as an internal project at eUniverse. Built on two pillars—customisable personal profile pages and a distribution hub for indie music—it captured teens and young adults. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation acquired it for about US$580 million in July 2005, and from 2005 to 2008 it was the world's largest social network, overtaking Google Search in US traffic in June 2006. Facebook's rise and MySpace's platform rigidity collapsed it from 2008 onward. In 2011 it was sold to Specific Media for about US$35 million—the textbook case of social-network hegemony transferring from one platform to another.
- EVT.002T2Facebook LaunchedA History of the Internet and the Web
- EVT.003T3YouTube FoundedA History of the Internet and the Web
- EVT.004T3Twitter LaunchedA History of the Internet and the Web
WhatsApp / Meta (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality) · Commons ↗ Jan Koum, ex-Yahoo, incorporated WhatsApp Inc. on 24 February 2009; Brian Acton joined as co-founder that October. As a phone-number-based SMS replacement with no ads and a US$0.99 annual fee, it spread worldwide. Facebook announced the acquisition on 19 February 2014—about US$16 billion by Facebook's own release, US$19 billion once the US$3 billion in restricted stock is added, and roughly US$22 billion in value when it closed on 6 October 2014. End-to-end encryption using the Signal Protocol shipped in 2016. WhatsApp passed 3 billion monthly active users in 2025—the same year Meta introduced advertising and revoked the founders' pledge—and Russia blocked it outright in February 2026.
2010s
Instagram / Meta (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality) · Commons ↗ Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger launched Instagram on the App Store as an iPhone-only photo-sharing app. The combination of square images, filters and a follow-based timeline reached 1 million users in two months. In April 2012, Facebook announced it would acquire Instagram for about US$1 billion—US$300 million in cash plus 23 million Facebook shares—when the company had thirteen employees. Subsequent expansions—Stories (2016), Reels (2020)—carried it to 3 billion monthly active users, a milestone Meta announced in September 2025, making it one of the world's largest social platforms and the product that turned the image into social media's central medium.
Snap Inc. (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality) · Commons ↗ Stanford students Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown launched Snapchat (originally Picaboo) with the concept of self-destructing photos. It introduced an 'ephemeral' mental model to a social-media field built on permanence. In 2013 the Wall Street Journal reported that Spiegel had turned down a US$3 billion offer from Facebook. Snap Inc IPO'd in March 2017 at an offering-price valuation near US$24 billion. It invented the Stories format (later cloned across Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter), pioneered face-tracking AR Lenses, and renamed itself Snap Inc. Q1 2026 DAU was 483 million—but North America has shrunk to 92 million.
2020s
- EVT.010T1Elon Musk Acquires Twitter for US$44 BillionA History of the Internet and the WebA General History of Information TechnologyRead more →
- EVT.011T1Meta Threads — 100 Million Sign-Ups in Five DaysA History of the Internet and the WebRead more →
Coolcaesar (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 4.0 · Commons ↗ The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, enacted 24 April 2024 as Division H of Public Law 118-50, gave ByteDance a choice: sever TikTok's US operations or lose distribution in the United States. On 17 January 2025 the Supreme Court upheld the Act per curiam in TikTok Inc. v. Garland. The app took itself offline that weekend and came back about fourteen hours later; four executive orders then pushed enforcement back, and Executive Order 14352 of 25 September 2025 declared a framework agreement to be a qualified divestiture. Definitive agreements were signed on 18 December 2025, and on 22 January 2026 TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC came into being. ByteDance fell back to 19.9 per cent; Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX came in as managing investors at 15 per cent each; a seven-member, majority-American board took charge, with Adam Presser as chief executive. The recommendation algorithm, however, remains ByteDance property, licensed to the joint venture and retrained for the US — and whether the severance Congress demanded actually occurred is still being asked on Capitol Hill.