A History of Social Media

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, briefly outpacing Google in US traffic. 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.

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Jan Koum and Brian Acton, both ex-Yahoo, launched WhatsApp as a phone-number-based SMS replacement. The policy—no ads, simple as free SMS, US$0.99 per year—drove global adoption. In February 2014, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for **US$19 billion**, one of the largest software M&A deals in tech history. End-to-end encryption arrived in 2016. By 2026 WhatsApp counts around 3.3 billion monthly active users, the world's largest messaging network. In the Global South it functions as quasi-infrastructure and is now central to telecoms regulation, political communication, and elections.

Related terms

End-to-End Encryption (E2EE)

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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 acquired Instagram for about US$1 billion when the company had thirteen employees. Subsequent expansions—Stories (2016), Reels (2020)—pushed monthly active users into the multiple-billion range by 2026 (reported figures span roughly 2.1 to 3 billion depending on source), making it one of the world's largest social platforms and the product that turned the image into social media's central medium.

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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 Spiegel rejected a US$3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook. Snap Inc IPO'd in March 2017 at roughly US$24 billion. It invented the Stories format (later cloned everywhere from Instagram to TikTok), prototyped social AR through Spectacles, and renamed itself Snap Inc. By 2026 Snapchat reports about 483 million DAU and remains a standard app for Gen Z.

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ByteDance, based in Beijing, launched Douyin (抖音) in September 2016 as a vertical short-video app for the Chinese domestic market. In August 2017 it launched a separate international app, TikTok. In November 2017 it acquired the US lip-sync app Musical.ly for around US$1 billion and merged it into TikTok in August 2018. Algorithm-driven recommendation through the For You feed—not the follow graph—captured the discretionary time of young and middle-aged users worldwide. The Trump administration tried to ban it in 2020; it became the focal case of US-China social-media regulation. On 22 January 2026, a divestiture deal sold US TikTok operations to a consortium led by Oracle, after a brief 12-hour blackout. As of May 2026 global MAU is around 2 billion; ByteDance's private valuation puts it among the largest tech companies in the world.

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On 17 March 2018, The Observer and The New York Times jointly reported that the British data-analytics firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly harvested the data of about 87 million Facebook users and used it in the 2016 US presidential election (for the Trump campaign) and the Brexit referendum. The story was driven by whistleblower Christopher Wylie. On 10–11 April, Mark Zuckerberg testified before the US Senate and House for over ten hours combined. In July 2019, the US Federal Trade Commission imposed a **US$5 billion** fine on Facebook—then the largest in FTC history. Cambridge Analytica went bankrupt in May 2018. The episode is the turning point at which Western political establishments adopted as standard the view that social media is a structural vulnerability of democracy.

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Proposed in April, attempted to withdraw in July with litigation following, the deal finally closed on 27 October. Purchase price: US$44 billion. Within hours of closing, Musk dismissed the CEO, CFO, and head of legal; within a week he laid off roughly half the workforce (about 3,700 people), replaced the verified badge with a monthly subscription (Twitter Blue), and shrank content moderation. Citing free-speech grounds, he reinstated accounts permanently suspended including Donald Trump's. The platform was renamed X in July 2023. One of the largest social-media platforms became, unusually, the personal property of a billionaire.

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A General History of Information Technology · A History of the Internet and the Web

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Meta launched Threads, an Instagram-linked text-based social network, in 100 countries. It reached 100 million users in five days—wildly surpassing ChatGPT's two-month record and becoming the fastest-growing consumer product of its time. The play was to capture Twitter users disrupted under Musk's management by leveraging Instagram's two-billion-user base. By 2025, Threads had grown to roughly 350 million monthly active users, comparable in scale to Twitter/X. A continuation of the microblogging form introduced in 2006—but launched as a hijack of an existing social graph rather than from cold.

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A History of the Internet and the Web

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