Social media are interactive computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation or sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks.^[1][2] The variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available introduces challenges of definition; however, there are some common features:^[2]

1. Social media are interactive Web 2.0Internet-based applications.^[2][3]
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][3]
3. Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.^[2][4]
4. Social media facilitate the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.^[2][4]

Users usually access social media services via web-based apps on desktops and laptops, 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 through which individuals, communities, and organizations can share, co-create, discuss, participate and modify user-generated content or self-curated content posted online. Networks formed through social media change the way groups of people interact and communicate or stand with the votes. They "introduce substantial and pervasive changes to communication between organizations, communities, and individuals".^[1] These changes are the focus of the emerging fields of technoself studies. Social media differ from paper-based media (e.g., magazines and newspapers) and traditional electronic media such as TV broadcasting, Radio broadcasting in many ways, including quality,^[5]reach, frequency, interactivity, usability, immediacy, and performance. Social media outlets operate in a dialogic transmission system (many sources to many receivers).^[6] This is in contrast to traditional media which operates under a mono-logic transmission model (one source to many receivers), such as a newspaper which is delivered to many subscribers, or a radio station which broadcasts the same programs to an entire city. Some of the most popular social media websites, with over 100 million registered users, include Facebook (and its associated Facebook Messenger), TikTok, WeChat, Instagram, QZone, Weibo, Twitter, Tumblr, Baidu Tieba and LinkedIn. Other popular platforms that are sometimes referred to as social media services (differing on interpretation) include YouTube, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, LINE, Snapchat, Pinterest, Viber, Reddit, Discord, VK, and more.

Observers have noted a wide range of positive and negative impacts of social media use. 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.

History[edit]

Front panel of the 1969-era ARPANET Interface Message Processor.

IMP log for the first message sent over the Internet, using ARPANET.

Social media may have roots in the 1840s introduction of the telegraph, which connected the United States.^[7] The PLATO system 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 crowd-sourced 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.^[8] 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.^[9] 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, had already appeared by 1973. True electronic bulletin board systems 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.^[10] 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 semiconductorimage sensor technology facilitated the development and rise of social media.^[11] 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,^[12][13] and then the complementary MOS (CMOS) active-pixel sensor (CMOS sensor) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1993.^[12][14] CMOS sensors enabled the mass proliferation of digital cameras and camera phones, which bolstered the rise of social media.^[11]

An important feature of social media is digital mediadata compression,^[15][16] due to the impractically high memory and bandwidth requirements of uncompressed media.^[17] The most important compression algorithm is the discrete cosine transform (DCT),^[17][18] a lossy compression technique that was first proposed by Nasir Ahmed in 1972.^[19] DCT-based compression standards include the H.26x and MPEGvideo coding standards introduced from 1988 onwards,^[18] and the JPEGimage compression standard introduced in 1992.^[20][15] JPEG was largely responsible for the proliferation of digital images and digital photos which lie at the heart of social media,^[15] and the MPEG standards did the same for digital video content on social media.^[16] The JPEG image format is used more than a billion times on social networks every day, as of 2014.^[21][22]

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

GeoCities was one of the World Wide Web's earliest social networking websites, appearing in November 1994, followed by Classmates in December 1995 and SixDegrees in May 1997. According to CBS news, SixDegrees is "widely considered to be the very first social networking site", as it included "profiles, friends lists and school affiliations" that could be used by registered users.^[23]Open Diary was launched in October 1998; LiveJournal in April 1999; Ryze in October 2001; Friendster in March 2003; the corporate and job-oriented site LinkedIn in May 2003; hi5 in June 2003; MySpace in August 2003; Orkut in January 2004; Facebook in February 2004; YouTube in February 2005; Yahoo! 360° in March 2005; Bebo in July 2005; the text-based service Twitter, in which posts, called "tweets", were limited to 140 characters, in July 2006; Tumblr in February 2007; Instagram in July 2010; and Google+ in July 2011.^[24][25][26]

Definition and classification[edit]

The variety of evolving stand-alone and built-in social media services makes it challenging to define them.^[2] However, marketing and social media experts broadly agree that social media includes the following 13 types of social media:^[27]

• blogs,
• business networks,
• collaborative projects,
• enterprise social networks,
• forums,
• microblogs,
• photo sharing,
• products/services review,
• social bookmarking,
• social gaming,
• social networks,
• video sharing, and
• virtual worlds.^[27]

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.^[4] A more recent paper from 2015^[2] reviewed the prominent literature in the area and identified four common features unique to then-current social media services:

1. Social media are Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.^[2][3]
2. User-generated content (UGC) is the lifeblood of the social media organism.^[2][3]
3. Users create service-specific profiles for the site or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.^[2][4]
4. Social media facilitate the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.^[2][4]

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]

Classification of social media and overview of how important different types of social media (e.g. blogs) are for each of a company's operational functions (e.g. marketing)^[27]

The development of social media started off with simple platforms such as sixdegrees.com.^[30] Unlike instant messaging clients, such as ICQ and AOL's AIM, or chat clients like IRC, iChat or Chat Television, sixdegrees.com was the first online business that was created for real people, using their real names. The first social networks were short-lived, however, because their users lost interest. The Social Network Revolution has led to the rise of networking sites. Research^[31] shows that the audience spends 22% of their time on social networks, thus proving how popular social media platforms have become. This increase is because of the widespread daily use of smartphones.^[32] Social media are used to document memories, learn about and explore things, advertise oneself and form friendships as well as the growth of ideas from the creation of blogs, podcasts, videos, and gaming sites.^[33] Networked individuals create, edit, and manage content in collaboration with other networked individuals. This way they contribute to expanding knowledge. Wikis are examples of collaborative content creation.

Mobile social media[edit]

The heavy usage of smartphones among young people relates to the significant percentage of social media users who are from this demographic.

Mobile social media refer to the use of social media on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. Mobile social media are a useful application of mobile marketing because the creation, exchange, and circulation of user-generated content can assist companies with marketing research, communication, and relationship development.^[34] 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 (time-sensitivity). According to Andreas Kaplan, mobile social media applications can be differentiated among four types:^[34]

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 PlacesWhatsApp; 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 Twitter messages or Facebook status updates)
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[edit]

Viral content[edit]

Some social media sites have potential for content posted there to spread virally over social networks. The term is an analogy to the concept of viral infections, which can spread rapidly from person to person. In a social media context, content or websites that are "viral" (or which "go viral") are those with a greater likelihood that users will reshare content posted (by another user) to their social network, leading to further sharing. In some cases, posts containing popular content or fast-breaking news have been rapidly shared and reshared by a huge number of users. Many social media sites provide specific functionality to help users reshare content, such as Twitter's retweet button, Pinterest's pin function, Facebook's share option or Tumblr's reblog function. Businesses have a particular interest in viral marketing tactics because a viral campaign can achieve widespread advertising coverage (particularly if the viral reposting itself makes the news) for a fraction of the cost of a traditional marketing campaign, which typically uses printed materials, like newspapers, magazines, mailings, and billboards, and television and radio commercials. Nonprofit organizations and activists may have similar interests in posting content on social media sites with the aim of it going viral. A popular component and feature of Twitter is retweeting. Twitter allows other people to keep up with important events, stay connected with their peers, and can contribute in various ways throughout social media.^[35] When certain posts become popular, they start to get retweeted over and over again, becoming viral. Hashtags can be used in tweets, and can also be used to take count of how many people have used that hashtag.

Bots[edit]

Social media can enable companies to get in the form of greater market share and increased audiences.^[36]Internet bots have been developed which facilitate social media marketing. Bots are automated programs that run over the Internet.^[37] Chatbots and social bots are programmed to mimic natural human interactions such as liking, commenting, following, and unfollowing on social media platforms.^[38] A new industry of bot providers has been created.^[39] Social bots and chatbots have created an analytical crisis in the marketing industry^[40] as they make it difficult to differentiate between human interactions and automated bot interactions.^[40] Some bots are negatively affecting their marketing data causing a "digital cannibalism" in social media marketing. Additionally, some bots violate the terms of use on many social mediums such as Instagram, which can result in profiles being taken down and banned.^[41]

"Cyborgs", a combination of a human and a bot,^[42][43] are used to spread fake news or create a marketing "buzz".^[44] Cyborgs can be bot-assisted humans or human-assisted bots.^[45] An example is a human who registers an account for which they set automated programs to post, for instance, tweets, during their absence.^[45] From time to time, the human participates to tweet and interact with friends. Cyborgs make it easier to spread fake news, as it blends automated activity with human input.^[45] When the automated accounts are publicly identified, the human part of the cyborg is able to take over and could protest that the account has been used manually all along. Such accounts try to pose as real people; in particular, the number of their friends or followers should be resembling that of a real person.

Patents of social media technology[edit]

Number of U.S. social network patent applications published and patents issued per year since 2003. The chart shows that the number of software applications published (the green bars) increased steadily from 2003 to 2007, and then shot up from 2008 to 2010.^[46]

There has been rapid growth in the number of U.S. patent applications that cover new technologies related to social media, and the number of them that are published has been growing rapidly over the past five years. There are now over 2000 published patent applications.^[47] As many as 7000 applications may be currently on file including those that haven't been published yet. Only slightly over 100 of these applications have issued as patents, however, largely due to the multi-year backlog in examination of business method patents, patents which outline and claim new methods of doing business.^[48]

Statistics on usage and membership[edit]

Social media websites are popular on mobile devices such as smartphones.

According to Statista, in 2020, it is estimated that there are around 3.6 billion people using social media around the globe, up from 3.4 billion in 2019. The number is expected to increase to 4.41 billion in 2025. ^[49]

Most popular social networks[edit]

The following list of the leading social networks shows the number of active users as of April 2020 (figures for Baidu Tieba, LinkedIn, Viber and Discord are from October 2019).^[50]

Usage[edit]

According to a survey conducted by Pew Research in 2018, Facebook and YouTube dominate the social media landscape, as notable majorities of U.S. adults use each of these sites. At the same time, younger Americans (especially those ages 18 to 24) stand out for embracing a variety of platforms and using them frequently. Some 78% of 18 - 24-year-old youngsters use Snapchat, and a sizeable majority of these users (71%) visit the platform multiple times per day. Similarly, 71% of Americans in this age group now use Instagram and close to half (45%) are Twitter users. However, Facebook remains the primary platform for most Americans. Roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults (68%) now report that they are Facebook users, and roughly three-quarters of those users access Facebook on a daily basis. With the exception of those 65 and older, a majority of Americans across a wide range of demographic groups now use Facebook.^[51] After this rapid growth, the number of new U.S. Facebook accounts created has plateaued, with not much observable growth in the 2016-18 period.^[52]

Use by organizations[edit]

Use by governments[edit]

Governments may use social media to (for example):^[53]

Use by businesses[edit]

The high distribution of social media in the private environment drives companies to deal with the application possibilities of social media on

• customer-organizational level
• and on intra-organizational level.^[54]

Marketplace actors can use social-media tools for marketing research, communication, sales promotions/discounts, informal employee-learning/organizational development, relationship development/loyalty programs,^[34] and e-Commerce. Often social media can become a good source of information and/or explanation of industry trends for a business to embrace change. Trends in social-media technology and usage change rapidly, making it crucial for businesses to have a set of guidelines that can apply to many social media platforms.^[55]

Companies are increasingly^[quantify] using social-media monitoring tools to monitor, track, and analyze online conversations on the Web about their brand or products or about related topics of interest. This can prove useful in public relations management and advertising-campaign tracking, allowing analysts to measure return on investment for their social media ad spending, competitor-auditing, and for public engagement. Tools range from free, basic applications to subscription-based, more in-depth tools.

Financial industries utilize the power of social media as a tool for analyzing sentiment of financial markets. These range from the marketing of financial products, gaining insights into market sentiment, future market predictions, and as a tool to identify insider trading.^[56]

Social media becomes effective through a process called^{[by whom?]} "building social authority".^[57] One of the foundation concepts in social media has become^[when?] that one cannot completely control one's message through social media but rather one can simply begin to participate in the "conversation" expecting that one can achieve a significant influence in that conversation.^[58]

Social media mining[edit]

Social media "mining" is a type of data mining, a technique of analyzing data to detect patterns. Social media mining is a process of representing, analyzing, and extracting actionable patterns from data collected from people's activities on social media. Google mines data in many ways including using an algorithm in Gmail to analyze information in emails. This use of the information will then affect the type of advertisements shown to the user when they use Gmail. Facebook has partnered with many data mining companies such as Datalogix and BlueKai to use customer information for targeted advertising.^[59] Ethical questions of the extent to which a company should be able to utilize a user's information have been called "big data".^[59] Users tend to click through Terms of Use agreements when signing up on social media platforms, and they do not know how their information will be used by companies. This leads to questions of privacy and surveillance when user data is recorded. Some social media outlets have added capture time and Geotagging that helps provide information about the context of the data as well as making their data more accurate.

In politics[edit]

Social media has a range of uses in political processes and activities. Social media have been championed as allowing anyone with an Internet connection to become a content creator^[60] and empowering their users.^[61] The role of social media in democratizing media participation, which proponents herald as ushering in a new era of participatory democracy, with all users able to contribute news and comments, may fall short of the ideals, given that many often follow like-minded individuals, as noted by Philip Pond and Jeff Lewis.^[62] Online media audience members are largely passive consumers, while content creation is dominated by a small number of users who post comments and write new content.^[63]:78

Younger generations are becoming more involved in politics due to the increase of political news posted on social media. Political campaigns are targeting Millennials online via social media posts in hope that they will increase their political engagement.^[64] Social media was influential in the widespread attention given to the revolutionary outbreaks in the Middle East and North Africa during 2011.^[65][66][67] During the Tunisian revolution in 2011, people used Facebook to organize meetings and protests.^[60] However, there is debate about the extent to which social media facilitated this kind of political change.^[68]

Social Media footprints of candidates have grown during the last decade and the 2016 United States Presidential election provides a good example. Dounoucos et al. noted that Twitter use by the candidates was unprecedented during that election cycle.^[69] Most candidates in the United States have a Twitter account.^[70] The public has also increased their reliance on social media sites for political information.^[69] In the European Union, social media has amplified political messages.^[71]

One challenge is that militant groups have begun to see social media as a major organizing and recruiting tool.^[72] The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIL, ISIS, and Daesh, has used social media to promote its cause. In 2014, #AllEyesonISIS went viral on Arabic Twitter.^[73] ISIS produces an online magazine named the Islamic State Report to recruit more fighters.^[74] Social media platforms have been weaponized by state-sponsored cyber groups to attack governments in the United States, European Union, and Middle East. Although phishing attacks via email are the most commonly used tactic to breach government networks, phishing attacks on social media rose 500% in 2016.^[75]

Use in hiring[edit]

Photos of college applicants engaging in activities contrary to a school's rules or values can adversely affect admission, as evident from this photo of a 40-year-old crack addict.

Some employers examine job applicants' social media profiles as part of the hiring assessment. This issue raises many ethical questions that some consider an employer's right and others consider discrimination. Many Western European countries have already implemented laws that restrict the regulation of social media in the workplace. States including Arkansas, California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin have passed legislation that protects potential employees and current employees from employers that demand that they provide their usernames and/or passwords for any social media accounts.^[76] Use of social media by young people has caused significant problems for some applicants who are active on social media when they try to enter the job market. A survey of 17,000 young people in six countries in 2013 found that 1 in 10 people aged 16 to 34 have been rejected for a job because of online comments they made on social media websites.^[77]

Use in school admissions[edit]

It is not only an issue in the workplace but an issue in post-secondary school admissions as well. There have been situations where students have been forced to give up their social media passwords to school administrators.^[78] There are inadequate laws to protect a student's social media privacy, and organizations such as the ACLU are pushing for more privacy protection, as it is an invasion. They urge students who are pressured to give up their account information to tell the administrators to contact a parent or lawyer before they take the matter any further. Although they are students, they still have the right to keep their password-protected information private.^[79]

Before social media,^[80] admissions officials in the United States used SAT and other standardized test scores, extra-curricular activities, letters of recommendation, and high school report cards to determine whether to accept or deny an applicant. In the 2010s, while colleges and universities still use these traditional methods to evaluate applicants, these institutions are increasingly accessing applicants' social media profiles to learn about their character and activities. According to Kaplan, Inc, a corporation that provides higher education preparation, in 2012 27% of admissions officers used Google to learn more about an applicant, with 26% checking Facebook.^[81] Students whose social media pages include offensive jokes or photos, racist or homophobic comments, photos depicting the applicant engaging in illegal drug use or drunkenness, and so on, may be screened out from admission processes.

Use in law enforcement and investigations[edit]

Social media has been used extensively in civil and criminal investigations.^[82] It has also been used to assist in searches for missing persons.^[83] Police departments often make use of official social media accounts to engage with the public, publicize police activity, and burnish law enforcement's image;^[84][85] conversely, video footage of citizen-documented police brutality and other misconduct has sometimes been posted to social media.^[85]

In the United States U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement identifies and track individuals via social media, and also has apprehended some people via social media based sting operations.^[86]U.S. Customs and Border Protection (also known as CPB) and the United States Department of Homeland Security use social media data as influencing factors during the visa process, and continue to monitor individuals after they have entered the country.^[87] CPB officers have also been documented performing searches of electronics and social media behavior at the border, searching both citizens and non-citizens without first obtaining a warrant.^[87]

Use in court cases[edit]

Social media comments and images are being used in a range of court cases including employment law, child custody/child support and insurance disability claims. After an Apple employee criticized his employer on Facebook, he was fired. When the former employee sued Apple for unfair dismissal, the court, after seeing the man's Facebook posts, found in favor of Apple, as the man's social media comments breached Apple's policies.^[88] After a heterosexual couple broke up, the man posted "violent rap lyrics from a song that talked about fantasies of killing the rapper's ex-wife" and made threats against him. The court found him guilty and he was sentenced to jail.^[88] In a disability claims case, a woman who fell at work claimed that she was permanently injured; the employer used her social media posts of her travels and activities to counter her claims.^[88]

Courts do not always admit social media evidence, in part because screenshots can be faked or tampered with.^[89] Judges are taking emojis into account to assess statements made on social media; in one Michigan case where a person alleged that another person had defamed them in an online comment, the judge disagreed, noting that there was an emoji after the comment which indicated that it was a joke.^[89]