A Brief History of Social Media
The Internet has a long history that includes a nascent stage of decentralization followed by the consolidation of power into the hands of a few Big Tech superstars. Some of those superstars are social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter.
From the early days of the ARPANET to the genesis of the World Wide Web, decentralization has been embedded in the technological infrastructure that now powers much of civilization. To understand how social media has played a part in the centralization of the Internet’s power structure, let’s look at the history of social media itself.
What Is Social Media?
There are as many definitions of social media as there are social media users, but for the purpose of this discussion I’ll define social media as a website where users interact with each other through the tools of the platform and most of the content on the platform is user-generated. With traditional media (television, radio, newspapers, magazines, etc.), information and entertainment are one directional. The media producer is the active agent while the consumer is the passive receiver. On social media, each participant is both a media producer (an active agent) and a media consumer (a passive receiver). This unique feature of social media was made possible with the historic innovation of the Internet.
To go one step further, traditional media compensates its content producers. With social media, the platform makes all the money, sometimes billions of dollars, while content producers create the content with no compensation, or, in a few cases, through revenue sharing where the lion’s share of the revenue goes to the platform.
As of 2018, ~60 percent of adults in advanced economies use social networking websites. In emerging economies, it’s 53 percent.1 But where did social media come from, and where is it going?
Pre-Internet Social Media
Like TCP/IP, FTP, and SMTP, social media has an existence preceding the modern Internet. Here are a few ways ARPANET and the early Internet were social.
Usenet Groups
The Usenet today is used by a small group of enthusiasts, much like ham radios. At one time, anyone using the ARPANET was likely a subscriber to several Usenet groups.
On the Usenet, users could post messages, publish articles, read articles published by others, and subscribe to news feeds. Usenet groups could be general in nature or specialize in a particular type of information. For instance, a group of bass fishermen could set up a Usenet group to discuss news and information related to their favorite sports hobby. Technology enthusiasts could have their own Usenet groups, as could housewives, chefs, babysitters, and truck drivers. The distinguishing feature that made the Usenet valuable is decentralization.
Due to their nature, no central entity controlled Usenet groups. Anyone could access and post to them if they had the means. Distribution of information relied on a network of computer servers (Figure 3.1). Each new server joining the network changed the Usenet in some small way.
The Usenet is the forerunner to today’s Internet forums and Facebook groups. It began to fall out of fashion in the first decade of the third millennium when states started breaking up child pornography rings operating on the network.
Figure 3.1 A diagram of the decentralized structure of Usenet servers and clients. XY and YZ above the servers indicate which groups users can subscribe to on that server. Arrows between servers represent articles from groups those servers share between them. Users subscribed to groups are represented by arrows between computers and servers and indicate that users can upload and download articles to and from that server depending on which group each user has access to as represented by X, Y, or Z
Credit: Taylored Content
Bulletin Boards
A bulletin board system (BBS) was a primitive text-based forum that centered around a specific topic. The systems were popular among topic enthusiasts and allowed members to interact with each other on a two-dimensional screen in the same manner that Internet forums currently do. However, unlike Usenet groups, BBSs were centralized.
Much like Facebook groups and forums have moderators, a BBS had a system operator, also called SysOp. The SysOp ran the BBS from their home or office with a computer, at least one modem, and a software package that managed the look and feel of the bulletin board and facilitated communication between users. Of course, there was also the community of members who interacted with each other on the system.
Graphics, if there were any, were primitive. Because the economics of digital subscriber lines was prohibitive before the 1990s, BBSs operated on modems. With a limited bitrate, graphics weren’t very practical. Even the graphical user interface (GUI)-based BBSs of the late 1980s and early 1990s had their graphical limitations. The benefit to these systems is that multiple users could communicate on a common bulletin board-like Web interface in a way that wasn’t practical through e-mail.
Internet Relay Chat
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was created in 1988,2 two years before the advent of the World Wide Web. That makes it a late development in pre-Internet social communications (1983 is marked as the official beginning of the modern Internet).3
The essence of IRC is that it was designed for group communication but is more like Facebook Messenger and other Internet chat protocols than an Internet forum. That makes it distinctly different than BBSs because its nature allowed for groups to communicate instantly with each other by being logged into the system at the same time.
Like a BBS, IRC was text-based and required a moderator. However, groups of users could establish a channel that would allow them to create their own thread on a specific topic separate from the general conversation thread.
The IRC moderator was called the IRC operator, or IRCop. Each channel could have its own operator, called a channel operator. In that sense, the IRC operated more like a forum or Facebook group than a Usenet group and allowed anyone to access and post communications that were often unmoderated.
The Challenges of Primitive Social Communications
Though they were steps toward better social networking systems, these primitive social networking protocols had some challenges. One challenge was user privacy. Another was security.
IRC did not involve encryption, which means it was vulnerable to a specific type of attack called denial-of-service. They could be taken offline so that users could not log into the service. That was a huge inconvenience when it happened, especially to the IRCop and channel operators since they were the ones responsible for getting the service back online.
BBS, like Usenet groups, became popular destinations for child pornographers and intellectual property thieves.
These precursors to modern social networks did set the stage for the social Internet and pioneered many of the terms we currently use to describe events that happen on the Internet. One of these terms, “fork,” is particularly relevant to blockchain technology.
There are hard forks and soft forks, but this term began with IRCs. In 1990, two years to the month after the creation of IRC, a server run by an IRC network out of Berkeley, California split in two and the first was disbanded. As of today, bitcoin, the granddaddy of all cryptocurrencies, has experienced several forks of its own.
The Rise of Internet-Based Social Media
It didn’t take long after the commercialization of the Internet before this new creation lead to the development of its own social networks. The first real social network on the commercial Internet saw the light of day in 1997. But before we get to that, let’s discuss a couple of precursors to the social networking website.
While IRC was created in 1988, it can rightly be called the forerunner to Internet-based chat rooms. It wasn’t long before Internet users could chat in real time.
Work on a new Internet programming language called Java, developed by Sun Microsystems, began in 1991.4 Introduced in 1995, it quickly became the standard language for Internet graphics. Immediately, Java chat rooms popped up on websites all over the Internet.
AOL (America Online) launched in the mid-1980s as a gaming company called Control Video Corporation.5 In 1989, just a few months before the World Wide Web went public, AOL underwent its second renaming to become the popular Internet service provider (ISP) that millions of people used to access the Internet until they learned better. When Java was introduced, chat rooms became one of its most popular features.
Online Dating
Dating, by its very nature, is social. Online dating has been popular almost since the day the word “online” came into usage.
MatchMaker.com, the first online dating service, precedes the World Wide Web. Since then, thousands of online dating websites have launched, many of them specializing in niche demographics.
Online dating has become so popular that it is a major part of pop culture. As early as 1998, the movie You’ve Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, featured a comedic look at relationships that begin by e-mail. While e-mail itself isn’t particularly a social medium, the protagonists’ e-mail relationship in this popular flick begins when the two meet in an Internet chat room.
MatchMaker officially launched in 1986 as a BBS-based matchmaking service.6 In 1992, the company began providing its services by telnet, an early communications protocol that used the foundational Internet application TCP/IP. In 1996, MatchMaker acquired the domain name matchmaker.com and the company officially moved its services online. However, two other online dating websites beat them to the punch. Kiss.com launched in 1994 and Match.com in 1995. Daters officially had their own social networks. Match.com is the only one of the three still operational.
Six Degrees
While chat rooms and dating websites were popular ways to socialize on the early Web, most Internet history buffs would agree that Six Degrees was the first platform that can truly be called social networking. Launched in 1997, users were able to create a profile and befriend other users. The site also allowed nonregistered Internet users to confirm friendships without joining the site.
The fact that the sole purpose of Six Degrees was to facilitate nonromantic friendships with new acquaintances is what puts it in the social networking category.
Social networking distinguishes itself from online dating in important ways. The goal is not to find a lifelong mate or short-term sex partners, though both of those may occur as users get to know each other. The real purpose is to use the resources of the platform to find people of common interest and get to know them on a personal basis. Whether that leads to sex, marriage, a business arrangement, or another type of connection depends on the mutual interests of the parties involved.
Six Degrees breathed its final breath in 2000 in the wake of the dot-com bust. The Web domain is still live, but it’s a virtual ghost town.
Blogger
Shortly after Six Degrees launched, blogging became a popular medium of expression allowing bloggers to interact with readers through threaded comments. But a blog, like a website, needs a host.
Popular free blog hosting website Blogger.com, now owned by Google, was launched in 1999 and helped to usher in the age of blogging as a social medium. Blogger.com allows users to interact with each other through their blog accounts and even allows for multiuser blogs, putting the “social” in social blogging. WordPress.com launched in 2005 to compete, but the downloadable blogging software version of the brand (WordPress.org) had launched in 2003.
Makeoutclub
With a name like Makeoutclub, one might assume this niche social website was another dating service. Rather, its focus was on indie music culture, specifically emo and hardcore rock. The website is important for its contributions to social media features that have become a true hallmark to social websites today.
Makeoutclub launched in 1999.7 Its features included customizable profile photos, profile sections that allowed users to specify their unique interests, forums, image galleries, private messaging, message boards, and chronological page numbers. That last feature became a unique hallmark to the website itself as users took pride in having an early page number. Despite not being a dating site, Makeoutclub did have a “crush list” as a basic feature.
Other than its unique features, Makeoutclub was important because it received a lot of industry press and its founders were featured in popular media such as Time Magazine, Spin Magazine, and Rolling Stone Magazine, as well as MTV2. It is now defunct.
Napster
Napster, a peer-to-peer music file sharing service, opened its doors in 1999 but was shut down in 2002 following a court injunction preventing users on the site from sharing copyrighted music through the service.
While Napster possessed elements of social networking, its primary purpose was file sharing. One of the early success stories in peer-to-peer file sharing, at its peak in 2001 the site had 80 million registered users.8 Several music recording companies sued Napster, accusing the site of copyright infringement. Net citizens debated, both online and offline, whether Napster was guilty of encouraging illegal intellectual property theft and piracy or was simply a facilitator of legitimate personal product ownership borrowing. It didn’t help that several musical albums had found their way onto the site’s servers prerelease and before any singles had been publicly available. In more than one instance, such piracy led to record sales for the artist on album release date.
Not only were the public and legal experts, scholars, and technology buffs divided over Napster’s legitimacy, but recording artists themselves couldn’t agree. Some loathed Napster. Others loved it because it allowed them to find new fans even if it meant losing sales on specific albums. Some saw it as a net good.
At the end of the day, the court had its say. Napster was forced to change its business model and pay royalties to music artists.
Friendster
Friendster launched in 2002 and morphed into a social gaming website in 2011. The company grew fast and had 3 million registered users within a few months.
Like Six Degrees, Friendster allowed users to set up profiles and connect with strangers they called “friends.”
Friendster is important in the development of social media in several ways. It received a lot of high-profile press due to patented technology, excellent marketing, and rapid word-of-mouth advertising. Friendster’s technology was so valuable to the growth of social media, and the Internet as a whole, that Facebook paid $40 million for 18 Friendster patents in 2010.9
Another milestone achievement in social media came early in the website’s life. In 2003, Google offered to buy out the website for $30 million.10 The company’s management declined.
In 2006, the company received an injection of $13 million in capital from investors11 and another $20 million in 2008.12 It was one of the first social media websites to attract large investors, such as DAG Ventures, IDG Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Friendster also won several Internet industry awards for its achievements.
The social networking concept pioneered and made popular by Friendster grew in popularity and other websites began to follow suit.
Friendster suspended its services in 2015, unable to compete with Facebook.
Founded in 2002, LinkedIn launched in May 2003 as a social networking site for job seekers. It got off to a slow start and didn’t go public until years later. Today, the site is popular with business professionals and job seekers.
In 2003, the company secured an investment from Sequoia Capital in its first funding round. The next year, they logged 1 million users and achieved profitability as a private company in 2006. In June 2008, Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners purchased 5 percent of the company for $53 million.13 Soon after, the company started its international expansion and went public in January 2011. Microsoft bought the company in 2016 for $26.2 billion.
At its IPO, LinkedIn’s stock sold for $45 per share.14 On the date Microsoft purchased the company, shares were valued at $196 each.15
As of 2017, 94 percent of business-to-business marketers have distributed content on the platform.16
LinkedIn has been criticized over user privacy concerns, e-mail account mining, and security issues.
MySpace
On the heels of Napster’s demise, MySpace rose to take the music scene to a new level. It was the first social media platform to become an international sensation. New users were automatically connected to site cofounder Tom Anderson, known simply as “Tom.”
MySpace launched in 2003. By 2005, it was the largest social networking website in the world with more than 100 million accounts.17 Of course, many of those accounts were fake or inactive. That didn’t stop News Corporation, owned by Rupert Murdoch, from purchasing the Web property for $580 million in July 2005. One year later, it was the most visited website on the planet,18 stripping both Yahoo! and Google of the honor. But this status wouldn’t last. The site was overtaken by Facebook in 2008 as the most popular social media site in the world and MySpace soon faded into oblivion.
What made MySpace such a phenomenon was its focus on pop culture and music. If it wasn’t for MySpace, the upstart video sharing site YouTube might not have risen to prominence so quickly.
MySpace also boosted the careers of several pop artists. Among the music artists whose careers took off from MySpace are Katy Perry,19 Ke$ha,20 Owl City, and Arctic Monkeys,21 to name a few.
One didn’t need to be a musician to take advantage of the popularity of MySpace. It was also a good place to find music artists you’d never heard of. Users could share their favorite music with their friends and discuss popular music on their MySpace blogs. This was in the burgeoning days of independent music artists successfully promoting themselves online.
It was in the wake of the peer-to-peer sharing environment pioneered by Napster, and on the heels of the dot-com bust, which led to the loss of millions of dollars in failed Internet startups, that MySpace was born into and thrived. It rose to worldwide fame like the Beatles and Elvis Presley. It had wings, and it flew. Then it crashed and burned.
MySpace is still active, but like Six Degrees, there isn’t a lot going on there now. Rupert Murdoch became the laughingstock of Silicon Valley after purchasing the site because it wasn’t much later when a new upstart ran it off the mountain and took over as King of the Hill.
Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard University when he launched what would become the world’s largest social media website. Today, he is among the wealthiest people in the world along with older wealth icons such as Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates. In fact, he’s the youngest of Forbes’ top 20 richest billionaires on the planet.22
Right from the beginning, Facebook (and Zuckerberg) was mired in controversy. Before creating Facebook with four college buddies (he wasn’t old enough to have legal drinking buddies), Zuckerberg built a website called Facemash. It was a “Hot or Not” type website featuring photos of Harvard students side by side and asking site users to vote on which one was the “hottest.” It became popular very fast, but Harvard administration shut the site down and nearly expelled Zuckerberg. They had charged him with breaching university computer system security, copyright violations for using photos without authorization, and violating individual privacy of Harvard students.23 Later, they dropped the charges.
One year after the Facemash incident, Zuckerberg teamed up with fellow Harvard students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes to launch The Facebook.24
The name was derived from college student directories, often called “face books.” Later, they dropped “the” and settled on simply Facebook. Six days after launch, three Harvard seniors accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network for Harvard students only to use their ideas to launch Facebook, a competitor. They sued and, in 2008, settled for 1.2 million shares of Facebook, which made them instant millionaires. Two of those seniors, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, today are proud owners of a cryptocurrency exchange called Gemini.
At launch, Facebook membership was limited to Harvard students. That was January 2004. In one month, more than half the student body at Harvard had joined. By March, site membership expanded to include students at Columbia, Stanford, and Yale. Later, the entire Ivy League was admitted before rolling out to the full slate of universities in North America. At the height of its popularity, Facebook boasted that 63 percent of U.S. people 12 years and older had a Facebook account.25 There were more than 2 billion monthly users worldwide in June 2017.26
By the middle of its first full year of operation, Facebook had attracted Sean Parker, cofounder of Napster, as its first president and Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal, as its first major investor. By summer of 2005, Facebook had attracted millions of dollars from other investors and expanded membership to high schools and corporations.
Facebook opened its doors to the public in September 2006, allowing anyone 12 years or older with a valid e-mail address to join. Since then, the site has become monolithic and has been embroiled in one controversy after another. Among the accusations hurled at the company include breach of individual user privacy, use of “shadow profiles,” data breaches, anticompetitive spying, the publication of objectionable content, and political manipulation.
These are all serious charges and each deserves its own discussion, especially as it relates to the topic at hand because many of these accusations are the reasons blockchain developers are working on competing social projects that promise to usher in the next grand age of the Internet. What they call Web 3.0, or Web3. Such an iteration of the World Wide Web would be decentralized, respect user privacy, be more secure, allow users to post what they want without fear of censorship or political retaliation, and allow for users to control their own data, including with whom they share that data, while providing the ability for users to profit from data ownership rather than third parties profiting by exploiting user data. Let’s take these one by one.
Privacy
Privacy has long been a concern of Facebook users. In 2007, Facebook launched a system called Beacon designed to give third-party websites access to a Facebook script that would send information to Facebook about actions Facebook users took on those third-party sites. This led to a class-action lawsuit that was settled in 2009 and Facebook discontinued the program.27 One allegation involved Facebook collecting information on users even if they were logged out and opted out of the program.28
Three years later, the Electronic Frontier Foundation proved that anyone could gain access to private Facebook profile information even if that information wasn’t intended to be public.29
In 2011, an article in Pace Law Review pointed out that Facebook requires warrants only for specific government requests related to private messages less than 181 days old. Otherwise, the site reserves the right to disclose all other content to authorities on a fishing expedition whether there is a reasonable suspicion of illegal activity, or not.30 This effectively renders the Fourth Amendment’s protection from unreasonable search and seizure null and void—at least on Facebook’s platform.
Facebook has been accused of creating shadow profiles on people even if they don’t use Facebook. This is done by collecting information about their likes on third-party websites, Internet browsing history, and connections to Facebook users.31
Data Breaches
As early as 2005, students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology conducted a research project targeting Facebook with a phishing expedition using an automated script to retrieve public information on 70,000 Facebook profiles.32
Serious data breaches occurred affecting millions of Facebook users in 201833 and 201934. These were separate incidents executed by different alleged violators, but they illustrate that large websites with multitudes of users are high targets and do not necessarily have ironclad defenses against bad actors.
Spying
In 2013, Facebook acquired a company called Onavo. The company develops mobile apps and one which Facebook has found particularly useful is Onavo Protect VPN. A VPN is a virtual private network that allows users to browse the Internet anonymously. Facebook rolled the product into its own mobile app, rerouted user traffic through its own servers, and collected user data in the process.35 Facebook was then able to use the app to spy on competitors for the purpose of using that information to acquire them.36
In 2020, Facebook was accused of anticompetitive practices related to its acquisition of social media websites Instagram and Snapchat. Zuckerberg appeared before Congress to answer questions about an inquiry of that nature and is now facing a potential breakup of the company.
Objectionable Content
Among the criticisms hurled at Facebook over the years are negative side effects related to psychological addiction, increased stress levels, and lowered attention spans. These may seem harmless but can lead to serious medical issues including depression.
For the most part, the psychological effects of social media usage are self-inflicted. What is infinitely more serious and injurious to others are the many instances of content theft, posting of illegal or offensive material, the spread of hate speech, and sharing of conspiracy theories. In 2013, for instance, a high-profile campaign sought to have content endorsing rape and domestic violence banned from Facebook.37 Initially, Facebook’s policy regarding offensive content didn’t require removal of such content. After advertisers began boycotting the site, Facebook reversed its policy and changed course.38
In 2019, an active shooter at a mosque in New Zealand livestreamed the terrorist attack on Facebook and was arrested before the social media platform noticed the awful incident.39 Afterward, Facebook started blocking white nationalist, supremacist, and separatist content.
Fake news became an issue in the 2016 election with some Facebook critics suggesting that fake news swayed the election in Donald Trump’s favor. Facebook then announced it would partner with fact checkers to combat fake news.40 Since then, the site has been accused of censorship, largely for suspending the account of Alex Jones, host of InfoWars, and for banning certain InfoWars content.41
In 2018 and 2019, Facebook deleted over 3 billion fake accounts.
Political Manipulation
Early in March 2018, the world blew up on Facebook when a whistleblower and former employee of British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica revealed that the company used a mobile app to mine the personal data of millions of Facebook users under the guise of informed consent and then used that data to aid the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.42 The event led to the United Kingdom Information Commissioner’s Office imposing a fine on Facebook and the hashtag #deleteFacebook subsequently trended on Twitter.43
Facebook lost ground in other ways in the wake of the scandal. The number of likes, shares, and posts on the site declined by 20 percent in the months following44 and shares of Facebook fell by ~24 percent.45
Zuckerberg testified before Congress in April 2018 that it was his “personal mistake” not to have prevented the scandal.46
During the 2020 election cycle, Facebook became another controversial distraction regarding fake news and its influence on political outcomes. Zuckerberg appeared before Congress to defend its practice of censoring political speech.
Antitrust Violations
In 2019, Facebook faced a Federal Trade Commission antitrust investigation regarding its proposed digital currency Libra and payment system Calibra. The company started its blockchain experiment in 2017 and was planning a 2020 release date. Overnight, an international volcano of protest erupted, and Facebook halted its plans.47
It wasn’t long after that announcement that Facebook began losing key supporters. PayPal, which had signed on as a partner, pulled out. Visa, MasterCard, Stripe, and eBay all followed.48 Other companies did too. This forced Facebook back to the drawing board and the company announced late in 2020 that it would rebrand and launch its digital currency under the name of Diem.49
There were a ton of concerns with Facebook having a digital currency. Considering its track record on privacy and security, activists were jittery. Central banks had their own concerns, a huge one being how a worldwide cryptocurrency controlled by the largest social network in the world might affect national currencies like the U.S. dollar and the British pound. These are all valid concerns and one can easily see how Facebook pivoted based on them.
For starters, Facebook will not be the owner or controller of Diem. It will be involved in the Diem Association that oversees and manages the digital currency, along with other representatives. Secondly, Diem will be pegged to real world assets to give it stability.50 Still, Facebook’s influence on any digital currency should be a concern for everyone.
Invisible Influence
A lie can go around the world before the truth puts its pants on, a quote attributed to Winston Churchill. In the age of Facebook, a lie can go to the moon and back before the truth can dream.
Facebook’s business model encourages fake news and misinformation to rise to the top of the news feed. Such content feeds biases and elicits emotional responses, keeping eyes affixed to the news feed for a response. After all, winning the argument is paramount.
Facebook is a drug. Everything about it is designed to keep users on the platform longer to generate more content for free so that Facebook can capitalize. Everything users do is measured. What they click on, what they read, who they’re messaging, where they stop scrolling, and even what sites they visit when not on Facebook. Every single metric is used to influence users to stay longer and interact more so Facebook can sell more advertising.
While I believe people are responsible for their own behavior and how they spend their time, it’s much easier to say than do with a digital needle in your arm, especially when that needle is provided by the pusher profiting from your addiction.
Other Issues
Facebook has also had issues with treatment of employees. One huge concern among human rights activists is the company’s relationship with its graphic content moderators, who have had to operate under extreme conditions, and some have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2018, some moderators filed a class-action lawsuit, which settled in 2020 for a $52 million payout to the class.51
In 2020, according to eMarketer, over half the U.S. population were Facebook users. As of December 2020, Facebook owned four of the top six most used social media platforms—Facebook, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. No wonder there’s a push to break it up. As if owning the real world wasn’t enough, in October 2021, Facebook (the company, not the platform) announced it had changed its name to Meta to position itself for a hostile takeover of the future metaverse, a fictional reality of virtual gaming52.
YouTube launched in 2005 by three former PayPal employees and is now considered the second largest search engine in the world. Classified as a video sharing platform, it hosts videos for its base video content producers and their followers. In November 2006, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion, which means that Google owns the top two largest search engines on the Internet.
There was nothing novel or new about YouTube when it launched. Competing video sharing site Vimeo launched a year earlier. In fact, there were several video sharing sites at the time.53 However, a chance event led to YouTube outpacing them all in growth.
A Saturday Night Live skit was uploaded to YouTube not long after the site launched. It went viral and mainstream media picked it up. That drove more website traffic to YouTube and more users began uploading videos. But it didn’t take long for mainstream networks to begin shouting “copyright infringement” and “intellectual property theft.” As soon as YouTube would remove an unauthorized video uploaded by a user, another user would upload another version of it. This cat and mouse game continued until YouTube created policies to deal effectively with pirated content.
By January 2012, YouTube had 800 million unique visitors per month and 60 hours of new video uploaded every minute. By February 2017, there were 400 new video hours uploaded every minute.
Since Google bought YouTube, the site has been innovating and constantly improving its ability to earn revenue by creating new programs and revenue channels for users. That should be no surprise since Google practically invented modern Web monetization techniques with its paid advertising models. Still, like every other centralized social media platform, there have been criticisms and controversies surrounding user privacy, data security, and intellectual property rights infringement. The site has also been criticized for its handling of controversial content.
Reddit is unique among social networking websites. Billed as a social news aggregator, its purpose is different than the typical social networking website where users show up to share cat memes, post uninteresting selfies, and air their dirty laundry.
On December 12, 2020, Reddit was ranked as the 18th most-visited website in the world and the seventh most visited in the United States54, based on Alexa statistics.
One might think by now that social media startups are the province of college kids with too much time on their hands. Far be it from Reddit to dispel that perception, but that’s about as far as similarities go between Reddit and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. What many social media fans might find appealing about the latter two will hardly be found on Reddit, and if it is it won’t be well-received. By the same token, much of what you’ll find on Reddit wouldn’t go over so well at Facebook. The two websites are searching for different audiences.
Founded in 2005 by three students at the University of Virginia, the site was sold to Conde Nast Publications in October 2006 for somewhere in the range of $10 million to $20 million.55 Five years later, the site was spun off with other properties into a standalone subsidiary called Advance Publications.56 In 2014, Reddit attracted $50 million in investments from some heavy hitters in tech investing including Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and rapper Snoop Dogg. Three years later, the social website received another $200 million injection. In February 2019, Chinese company Tencent led a $300 million funding round leading to a $3 billion valuation.57
There are several Reddit features that set it apart from your typical social networking website. The first of these is its grass-roots culture. Many of the controversies associated with Reddit rise from its user base rather than its administration. It’s as close to being decentralized as a centralized social media company can be without a blockchain.
While Reddit has an organizational structure typical of a late 20th century/early 21st century U.S. company, the website is organized into subreddits, each one centered around a specific topic and managed by a moderator. Moderators are Reddit users, not employees of the company.
Another thing that sets Reddit apart from Facebook and other social media platforms is that each piece of content shared on the site can be upvoted or downvoted. Facebook has its characteristic Like button, but no Dislike button. Twitter has a heart for users who want to “love” a post, but there’s no associated “hate” or “unlove” feature. Other popular social media websites of the modern era have similar cultures. Redditors, as the site’s users are called, have thicker skin. Its users don’t complain about the downvote button. They adore it.
One feature that has grown in popularity over the years is the subreddit Ask Me Anything, affectionately referred to by users as “AMA,” which had more than 20 million subscribers in December 2020.58 Many celebrities have been subjects of its community interview format including former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, both of whom appeared as presidential candidates.
Like other social media conglomerates, Reddit has its share of controversies. In 2010, a kidney donor was viciously attacked when other Redditors grew suspicious of his calls for donations to support cancer research.59 In 2013, following the Boston Marathon bombing, several Reddit users wrongly identified the bomber as another Reddit user who had gone missing just before the bombing. He had committed suicide.60 The same year, moderators of the politics subreddit banned several high-profile left-wing and right-wing websites for what they deemed “bad journalism.61”
In 2015, CEO Ellen Pao became a controversial figure over the firing of an employee. More than 200,000 Redditors signed a petition calling for her removal.62 She resigned. Her replacement, Reddit founder Steve Huffman, was the center of a string of controversies the following year.
Reddit users, and Reddit company management, routinely get involved in political activism, which makes Reddit very different than most other social media websites. In 2013, the science subreddit banned climate change denial content. In 2012, Reddit and Wikipedia joined forces with other Web properties to protest the Stop Online Piracy and Protest IP bills introduced in Congress63 by shutting down their websites for a day in what is commonly called a “blackout.” Not all such political activism is initiated by the company. Reddit users themselves have used blackouts and other measures to protest issues they don’t like, even sometimes targeting Reddit management.
One more way Reddit stands out in the social media landscape is its support of bitcoin. In 2013, the site began accepting bitcoin as payment for its subscription service Reddit Gold, later rebranded Reddit Premium.
One thing is for sure. Reddit is not like other centralized social media websites in some very culture-specific ways. However, it is still centralized with centralization showing itself more stridently at the subreddit level than at the company level. That doesn’t make it any better in the eyes of some blockchain enthusiasts.
In 2006, Twitter launched as the first microblogging platform. You could hear the buzz on the moon.
What started as a simple website where users were limited to posting text messages of no more than 140 characters, including website addresses, without images, has expanded into much more. Its cofounders are a supergroup of technology entrepreneurs. Jack Dorsey went on to start payments company Square. Noah Glass is a pioneer of podcasting. Biz Stone was creative director at Zanga for a couple of years at the turn of the millennium and cofounded Jelly, a Q&A app. Evan Williams, the Paul McCartney of the bunch, founded both Blogger and Medium, both of which are two of the largest websites on the Internet.
Twitter is unique among social media startups in that it had no real purpose for being. Where other social networking websites had a stated purpose from the outset (YouTube was a video sharing site, Facebook was a social network for college students, Pinterest was for image sharing, etc.), Twitter didn’t. Even its founders had difficulty defining it.
Williams, in an interview with Inc. magazine said:
With Twitter, it wasn’t clear what it was. They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define, because it didn’t replace anything. There was this path of discovery with something like that, where over time you figure out what it is. Twitter actually changed from what we thought it was in the beginning, which we described as status updates and a social utility …. That led to all kinds of design decisions, such as the inclusion of search and hashtags and the way retweets work.64
Figure 3.2 In January 2009, Facebook overtook MySpace as most visited website and Twitter rose from No. 22 to No. 3 in monthly visits
Credit: Compete.com
Eventually, Twitter figured out what it wanted to be when it grew up. By 2009, it was the third highest ranking social networking website, according to the now defunct web traffic analysis service Compete.com (Figure 3.2).65 It saw more than 54 million visits in January that year.
Like other social networks playing the acquisition game, Twitter acquired other Web properties, which allowed it to beef up its own technology.
Twitter is a popular social network for celebrities. Politicians, professional athletes, recording artists, actors and actresses, and other well-known celebrities are active on Twitter and have large audiences. As of May 2020, the Twitter accounts with the most followers include former President Barack Obama with 118.09 million, Justin Bieber with 111.78 million, Katy Perry with 108.5 million, Rihanna with 96.94 million, and Taylor Swift with 86.14 million.66 Former President Donald Trump, a prolific user, was ranked 8 on the list.
Like other centralized social media platforms, Twitter has had its share of controversies. Almost from the beginning, it’s fought the spread of fake accounts, leading the website to begin offering users verified accounts in 2009.67 In 2017, the site stopped verifying users only to reinstitute its verification status the next year.68
Twitter has also had issues concerning data privacy, security, and the spread of misinformation69 on its platform. In fact, amid the coronavirus pandemic that disrupted the lives of people around the world in early 2020, Twitter announced that it would start adding warning labels to tweets containing misinformation about COVID-19.70 Two months later, more than 100 high-profile Twitter accounts were hacked with bitcoin-related tweets distributed through them promising a 100 percent return on anyone who sent bitcoin to a particular bitcoin wallet address.71 Twitter disabled tweeting and reset passwords on all accounts affected.
Less than a year before that major hack, Twitter cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey’s account was hacked allowing hackers to send crude messages and bomb threats through his account.72
In a separate 2020 incident, Facebook’s Twitter account was hacked by a Saudi hacker group named OurMine.73
During the 2020 political season, Twitter came under fire in some quarters for its policies regarding then-President Donald Trump’s tweets, which were controversial on their own. In May, the president tweeted that mail-in ballots were inherently fraudulent.74 A few days later, Trump published a controversial tweet about protests that turned violent after the George Floyd killing. He tweeted, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” This time, Twitter added a public interest notice to the tweet stating that it would have removed the post except that it was of public interest due to being published by the nation’s president.75 Finally, in January 2021, Twitter suspended the president’s account after he was accused of inciting the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6.76 CEO Jack Dorsey defended that move even while admitting that he shouldn’t have that kind of power.77
Like many other people, I’m concerned about any social media platform policing alleged misinformation, serving as an editorial gatekeeper, or inserting itself into the political process by determining what is or isn’t accurate information or of public interest. Just as news media consumers expect their news to be untainted with bias, it’s reasonable to expect social media platforms to maintain neutrality. It seems we truly have entered a brave new world.
Other Platforms
The social Internet just keeps growing. In the last few years, the pantheon of social media platforms has been joined by Pinterest, Quora, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and more. Each one has a centralized, hierarchical organizational structure.
History shows that social platforms that do three things well succeed. First, they’ve got to develop technology that attracts users and hooks them like a powerful drug. Second, they must secure funding from deep pockets. Third, they must use that funding to improve their technology by acquiring other assets that contribute to their overall mission, including talent from Big Tech, and market their product to the right users. It’s capitalism with a digital twist.
One could say the Internet wants to be social. It’s come a long way from its decentralized inception. Facebook didn’t make the Internet centralized, but it capitalized on the fact that it has something people want. Where search engines seized power and control with nameless and faceless algorithms, social networking websites exploited that power and control through their lack of transparency.
The question now is, What will the next iteration of the commercial Internet look like? Blockchain enthusiasts hope it looks like bitcoin—decentralized, private, secure, fast, and user-controlled.
Summary
Like the Internet itself, social media has a rich history and its developments have led us to our current state where the largest platforms have immense control over people’s lives and livelihoods. Early platforms were simpler and humbler. They weren’t seeking world domination. Over time, social media platforms have grown larger and more abusive. They have attracted huge financial investments from a few well-connected financiers and have exploited their own users by turning them into the product. They do this by promising more freedom and control, the opposite of what they deliver.
Additionally, social media platforms have attracted large-scale controversies right from the beginning. From data breaches to illegal and harmful activity, some of the most popular platforms have profited from such abuses. They’ve become increasingly more centralized and now wield more power than some governments can muster. Blockchain and cryptocurrency advocates are fighting to change this power imbalance through decentralization and social media is emerging as one battle front in that war.
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