Detailed · 16 events
A History of Social Media
2000s
Social media in the 2000s began with a page of your own in a web browser and ended at the edge of the phone. MySpace drew young users with profiles they could decorate and a hub for independent music, but Facebook, open to anyone with an email address from 2006, passed it in worldwide monthly visitors in 2008. YouTube rode the Flash plugin to put video in the browser; Twitter built its service around short messages that fitted SMS. WhatsApp, founded in 2009, used the phone number as identity, carried no advertising, and shipped its messaging app for the iPhone. In the 2010s the app became the stage.
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.002T1Facebook LaunchedA History of the Internet and the WebRead more →
mixi (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (PD-textlogo; trademarked) · Commons ↗ A Japanese social network that e-Mercury (now MIXI) began operating in February 2004, with a pre-opening on 22 February and a full launch on 3 March. Its signature was invitation-only membership. Users passed 10 million in May 2007 and 20 million in April 2010. The company renamed itself mixi in February 2006 and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's Mothers market that September. It added open registration in March 2010, but use fell during the shift to smartphones, and April–June 2013 brought its first quarterly loss since listing. The smartphone game Monster Strike, released that October, turned the business around, and on 16 December 2024 the company launched mixi2, a new invitation-only social network.
- EVT.004T1YouTube FoundedA History of the Internet and the WebRead more →
- EVT.005T1Twitter LaunchedA History of the Internet and the WebRead more →
2010s
Across the 2010s the feed changed in two ways: from text toward photos and video, and from what your friends posted toward what a system chose for you. Instagram began with square photos and filters; Snapchat brought pictures that vanished after seconds and a Stories format others would copy. ByteDance's Douyin, and TikTok as its international counterpart, held attention with a For You feed driven by recommendation rather than by follows. Then in 2018 reporting on Cambridge Analytica's use of Facebook data led to congressional testimony and fines on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 2020s the platforms became questions of state and ownership.
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.
LINE Corporation (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (PD-textlogo; trademarked) · Commons ↗ A messaging app in wide use in Japan. According to LY Corporation, it launched on 23 June 2011 as a communication service for staying connected with the people who matter, after many people were unable to reach family and friends in the Great East Japan Earthquake. The first version did not even have stickers. In May 2014 LINE Creators Market began letting individuals sell their own stickers. In 2021 it emerged that user information had been accessible to a contractor in China, and Japan's Personal Information Protection Commission and its Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications issued guidance. The operator merged with Yahoo Japan and others on 1 October 2023 to become LY Corporation, but that year unauthorised access via NAVER Cloud leaked data, and in March and April 2024 the ministry issued administrative guidance that also called for a review of the capital relationship with NAVER. In January 2026 LY said domestic monthly users had passed 100 million.
2020s
In the 2020s the contest was less about features than about who owns the platform. Elon Musk, after trying to back out of the deal and ending up in litigation, bought Twitter for US$44 billion, then removed its top executives, cut about half the staff and turned verification into a subscription. Meta answered with Threads, carrying Instagram's social graph across; sign-ups passed 100 million inside five days, though daily use soon fell steeply. A US law gave ByteDance the choice of divesting TikTok's American business or losing distribution there, and the resulting joint venture still licenses its recommendation algorithm from ByteDance.
- EVT.014T1Elon Musk Acquires Twitter for US$44 BillionA History of the Internet and the WebA General History of Information TechnologyRead more →
- EVT.015T1Meta 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.