Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks.[1][2] While challenges to the definition of social media arise[3][4] due to the variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available, there are some common features:[2]



  1. Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.[2][5]
  2. User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions—is the lifeblood of social media.[2][5]
  3. Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.[2][6]
  4. Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.[2][6]

The term social in regard to media suggests that platforms are user-centric and enable communal activity. As such, social media can be viewed as online facilitators or enhancers of human networks—webs of individuals who enhance social connectivity.[7]

Users usually access social media services through web-based apps on desktops or download services that offer social media functionality to their mobile devices (e.g. smartphones and tablets). As users engage with these electronic services, they create highly interactive platforms in which individuals, communities, and organizations can share, co-create, discuss, participate, and modify user-generated or self-curated content posted online.[8][6][1] Additionally, social media are used to document memories, learn about and explore things, advertise oneself, and form friendships along with the growth of ideas from the creation of blogs, podcasts, videos, and gaming sites.[9] This changing relationship between humans and technology is the focus of the emerging field of technological self-studies.[10] Some of the most popular social media websites, with more than 100 million registered users, include Twitter, Facebook (and its associated Messenger), WeChat, ShareChat, Instagram, QZone, Weibo, VK, Tumblr, Baidu Tieba, and LinkedIn. Depending on interpretation, other popular platforms that are sometimes referred to as social media services include YouTube, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, LINE, Snapchat, Pinterest, Viber, Reddit, Discord, TikTok, Microsoft Teams, and more. Wikis are examples of collaborative content creation.

Social media outlets differ from traditional media (e.g. print magazines and newspapers, TV, and radio broadcasting) in many ways, including quality,[11] reach, frequency, usability, relevancy, and permanence.[12] Additionally, social media outlets operate in a dialogic transmission system (i.e., many sources to many receivers) while traditional media outlets operate under a monologic transmission model (i.e., one source to many receivers). For instance, a newspaper is delivered to many subscribers, and a radio station broadcasts the same programs to an entire city.[13]

Since the dramatic expansion of the Internet, digital media or digital rhetoric can be used to represent or identify a culture. Studying the rhetoric that exists in the digital environment has become a crucial new process for many scholars.

Observers have noted a wide range of positive and negative impacts when it comes to the use of social media. Social media can help to improve an individual's sense of connectedness with real or online communities and can be an effective communication (or marketing) tool for corporations, entrepreneurs, non-profit organizations, advocacy groups, political parties, and governments. Observers have also seen that there has been a rise in social movements using social media as a tool for communicating and organizing in times of political unrest.

Social media can also be used to read or share news, whether it is true or false.



History of social media

See also: Timeline of social media

Early computing

Front panel of the 1969-era ARPANET Interface Message Processor.
IMP log for the first message sent over the Internet, using ARPANET.

The PLATO system was launched in 1960 after being developed at the University of Illinois and subsequently commercially marketed by Control Data Corporation. It offered early forms of social media features with 1973-era innovations such as Notes, PLATO's message-forum application; TERM-talk, its instant-messaging feature; Talkomatic, perhaps the first online chat room; News Report, a crowdsourced online newspaper, and blog and Access Lists, enabling the owner of a note file or other application to limit access to a certain set of users, for example, only friends, classmates, or co-workers.

ARPANET, which first came online in 1967, had by the late 1970s developed a rich cultural exchange of non-government/business ideas and communication, as evidenced by the network etiquette (or "netiquette") described in a 1982 handbook on computing at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.[14] ARPANET evolved into the Internet following the publication of the first Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) specification, RFC 675 (Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program), written by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine in 1974.[15] This became the foundation of Usenet, conceived by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, and established in 1980.

A precursor of the electronic bulletin board system (BBS), known as Community Memory, appeared by 1973. True electronic BBSs arrived with the Computer Bulletin Board System in Chicago, which first came online on February 16, 1978. Before long, most major cities had more than one BBS running on TRS-80, Apple II, Atari, IBM PC, Commodore 64, Sinclair, and similar personal computers. The IBM PC was introduced in 1981, and subsequent models of both Mac computers and PCs were used throughout the 1980s. Multiple modems, followed by specialized telecommunication hardware, allowed many users to be online simultaneously. Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL were three of the largest BBS companies and were the first to migrate to the Internet in the 1990s. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, BBSes numbered in the tens of thousands in North America alone.[16] Message forums (a specific structure of social media) arose with the BBS phenomenon throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. When the World Wide Web (WWW, or "the web") was added to the Internet in the mid-1990s, message forums migrated to the web, becoming Internet forums, primarily due to cheaper per-person access as well as the ability to handle far more people simultaneously than telco modem banks.

Digital imaging and semiconductor image sensor technology facilitated the development and rise of social media.[17] Advances in metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) semiconductor device fabrication, reaching smaller micron and then sub-micron levels during the 1980s–1990s, led to the development of the NMOS (n-type MOS) active-pixel sensor (APS) at Olympus in 1985,[18][19] and then the complementary MOS (CMOS) active-pixel sensor (CMOS sensor) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1993.[18][20] CMOS sensors enabled the mass proliferation of digital cameras and camera phones, which bolstered the rise of social media.[17]

Development of social-media platforms

SixDegrees, launched in 1997, is often regarded as the first social media site.

In 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee integrated hypertext software with the Internet, he created the World Wide Web, marking the beginning of the modern era of networked communication. This breakthrough facilitated the formation of online communities and enabled support for offline groups through the use of weblogs, list servers, and email services. The evolution of online services progressed from serving as channels for networked communication to becoming interactive platforms for networked social interaction with the advent of Web 2.0.[7]

Social media started in the mid-1990s with the advent of platforms like GeoCities, Classmates.com, and SixDegrees.com.[21] While instant messaging and chat clients existed at the time, SixDegrees was unique as it was the first online service designed for real people to connect using their actual names. It boasted features like profiles, friends lists, and school affiliations, making it "the very first social networking site" according to CBS News.[21][22] The platform's name was inspired by the "six degrees of separation" concept, which suggests that every person on the planet is just six connections away from everyone else.[23]

In the early 2000s, and social media platforms gained widespread popularity with the likes of Friendster and Myspace, followed by Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, among others.[24]

Research from 2015 shows that the world spent 22% of their online time on social networks,[25] thus suggesting the popularity of social media platforms, likely fueled by the widespread adoption of smartphones.[26] There are as many as 4.76 billion social media users in the world[27] as of January 2023, equating to 59.4% of the total global population.

Definition and features

The idea that social media are defined simply by their ability to bring people together has been seen as too broad, as this would suggest that fundamentally different technologies like the telegraph and telephone are also social media.[28] The terminology is unclear, with some early researchers referring to social media as social networks or social networking services in the mid-2000s.[6] A more recent paper from 2015 reviewed the prominent literature in the area and identified four common features unique to then-current social media services:[2]

  1. User-generated content[2][5]
  2. User-created self profiles[2][6]
  3. Social network formed by connections between profiles,[2][6] such as followers or groups

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)."[29]

While the variety of evolving stand-alone and built-in social media services makes it challenging to define them,[2] marketing and social media experts broadly agree that social media includes the following 13 types:[30]

Some services of other social media subtypes (such as Twitter and YouTube) also allow users to create a social network, and so are sometimes also included in the social network subtype.[6]

Mobile social media

Mobile social media refers to the use of social media on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. Mobile social media are useful applications of mobile marketing because the creation, exchange, and circulation of user-generated content can assist companies with marketing research, communication, and relationship development.[31] Mobile social media differ from others because they incorporate the current location of the user (location-sensitivity) or the time delay between sending and receiving messages.

Social media promotes users to share content with others and display content in order to enhance a particular brand or product.[32] Social media allows people to be creative and share interesting ideas with their followers or fans. Certain social media applications such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are places where users share specific political or sports content. Many reporters and journalists produce updates and information on sports and political news. It can truly give users pertinent and necessary information to stay up to date on relevant news stories and topics. However, there is a downside to it. Users are advised to exercise due diligence when they are using social media platforms.

According to Andreas Kaplan, mobile social media applications can be differentiated among four types:[31]

  1. Space-timers (location and time-sensitive): Exchange of messages with relevance mostly for one specific location at one specific point in time (e.g. Facebook Places, WhatsApp, Telegram, Foursquare)
  2. Space-locators (only location sensitive): Exchange of messages with relevance for one specific location, which is tagged to a certain place and read later by others (e.g. Yelp, Qype, Tumblr, Fishbrain)
  3. Quick-timers (only time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media mobile apps to increase immediacy (e.g. posting on Twitter or status updates on Facebook)
  4. Slow-timers (neither location nor time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media applications to mobile devices (e.g. watching a YouTube video or reading/editing a Wikipedia article)

Elements and function

Viral content

Main article: Viral phenomenon

Social media sites are powerful tools for sharing content across networks. Certain content has the potential to spread virally, an analogy for the way viral infections spread from individual to individual. When content or websites go viral, users are more likely to share them with their social network, which leads to even more sharing.

Viral marketing campaigns are particularly attractive to businesses because they can achieve widespread advertising coverage at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing campaigns. Nonprofit organizations and activists may also use social media to post content with the aim of it going viral.

Many social media sites provide specific functionality to help users re-share content, such as Twitter's "retweet" button or Facebook's "share" option. This feature is especially popular on Twitter, allowing users to keep up with important events and stay connected with their peers.[33] When certain posts become popular, they start to get retweeted over and over again, becoming viral. Hashtags can also be used in tweets to take count of how many people have used that hashtag.

However, it's important to note that not all content has the potential to go viral, and it's difficult to predict what content will take off. Despite this, viral marketing campaigns can still be a cost-effective and powerful tool for promoting a message or product.

Bots

Main article: Internet bot

Bots are automated programs that operate on the internet,[34] which have become increasingly popular due to their ability to automate many communication tasks. This has led to the creation of a new industry of bot providers.[35]

Chatbots and social bots are programmed to mimic natural human interactions such as liking, commenting, following, and unfollowing on social media platforms.[36] As companies aim for greater market shares and increased audiences, internet bots have also been developed to facilitate social media marketing.[37] With the existence of social bots and chatbots, however, the marketing industry has also met an analytical crisis, as these bots make it difficult to differentiate between human interactions and automated bot interactions.[38] For instance, marketing data has been negatively affected by some bots, causing "digital cannibalism" in social media marketing. Additionally, some bots violate the terms of use on many social media platforms such as Instagram, which can result in profiles being taken down and banned.[39]

'Cyborgs'—either bot-assisted humans or human-assisted bots[40]—are used for a number of different purposes both legitimate and illegitimate, from spreading fake news to creating marketing buzz.[41][42][43] A common legitimate use includes using automated programs to post on social media at a specific time.[44] In these cases, often, the human writes the post content and the bot schedules the time of posting. In other cases, the cyborgs are more nefarious, e.g., contributing to the spread of fake news and misinformation.[40] Often these accounts blend human and bot activity in a strategic way, so that when an automated account is publicly identified, the human half of the cyborg is able to take over and could protest that the account has been used manually all along. In many cases, these accounts that are being used in a more illegitimate fashion try to pose as real people; in particular, the number of their friends or followers resemble that of a real person.[40] Cyborgs are also related to sock puppet accounts, where one human pretends to be someone else, but can also include one human operating multiple cyborg accounts.