The History of Social Media

By Victor Hoang · Updated Oct 24, 2026

In 1973 a public computer terminal went up in a Berkeley record store. That same year a teaching network in Illinois added a way to reply to notes. The problem behind both was old. People who couldn't meet wanted to exchange news, ideas and company with others who shared an interest.

Online social life began there, in 1973. The profile-and-friends sites most people mean by "social media" arrived in 1997 with SixDegrees. They reached the mass market with Facebook in 2004. The throughline: people first used networks to talk in groups, then to map who knew whom. Now they mostly watch what an algorithm picks for them.

For the wider network story, see The History of the Internet, the Internet timeline and The History of Email, which covers the one-to-one cousin of this story.

Two terms first. A "bulletin board system" (BBS) is a computer you dial into to read and post messages. A "social graph" is the map of who is connected to whom, which the later sites turned into their main product.

Timeline at a Glance

The Letter Networks (1600s-1960s)

Strangers stay in touch through paper and wire

This era is the precursor, not social media. Picture a scholar's desk in the eighteenth century: a stack of letters from men and women in other countries whom he may never meet, each one answering a question he posted weeks earlier.

That was the Republic of Letters, which the National Endowment for the Humanities describes as a "loose grouping of learned men and women who comprised Europe's intellectual community." Letters carried theories, critiques and gossip. Stanford's Mapping the Republic of Letters project, whose case studies run from Galileo to Voltaire, logged the sender, recipient, date and place of each letter to draw the network. By the NEH's account, Voltaire's correspondence totals about 19,000 letters, and more than 15,000 of Benjamin Franklin's survive. Nobody had a profile, but everybody had a reputation, and the reputation traveled through the mail.

The telegraph added speed and a trade community. In her novel Wired Love, Ella Cheever Thayer follows a nineteen-year-old operator, Nattie Rogers, whose friendship with an unseen colleague forms entirely over the wire. The Gutenberg text was transcribed from an 1880 edition. It's fiction, but it shows that people already treated a signal line as a place to meet.

The new problem was reach. Both systems linked people one letter or one message at a time, and neither let a stranger walk in and read what everyone was saying. The community notice board, the paper kind, did that, and it was the idea the next era put on a computer.

For teams today: a community is made of exchanges among people who share a purpose, not of a platform. Before you pick a tool, name the exchange you want to happen.

The Bulletin Board Years (1973-1991)

Hobbyists and students build the first online rooms

Start in August 1973, in a Berkeley record store. Beside the paper bulletin board at Leopold's Records stood a computer terminal, and anyone could walk up and type. According to the Computer History Museum, the Community Memory project was started by Lee Felsenstein, Efrem Lipkin, Ken Colstad, Jude Milhon and Mark Szpakowski, working with the nonprofit Resource One, which donated a timesharing SDS-940 mainframe. The museum calls it "a pre-Web social network." It ran until 1992. Notice what it was built next to: a community notice board, the oldest social medium of all.

The same year, on a teaching network in Illinois, a teenager named David Woolley changed how people used it. He had joined the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) at the University of Illinois in 1972 at age 16, according to the Computer History Museum. PLATO Notes began as a bug-reporting tool. On 7 August 1973, per Living Internet, a version went live that let each note collect up to 63 responses, which made an ongoing conversation possible. That fall Doug Brown wrote Talkomatic, where each user had a window and characters appeared as they were typed, with channels of up to five participants. The Museum's profile of Woolley says Notes "gave birth to the world's first online community."

Then came the hobbyists. On 16 February 1978, the Computerized Bulletin Board System launched in Chicago, writes the Engineering and Technology History Wiki. Ward Christensen, a computer hobbyist, wanted members of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange to share messages by phone line across different hardware, and Randy Suess helped build it after a January 1978 blizzard. The idea spread fast, as the same source's count shows.

Source: ETHW. The same page records the FidoNet BBS network growing from 400 nodes in 1985 to a peak of 35,787 in 1995.

Other builders went wider. In 1979, Duke graduate students Jim Ellis and Tom Truscott conceived Netnews, which became Usenet, so universities outside DARPA research could share messages. Steve Bellovin of the University of North Carolina wrote the first program in a few pages of Bourne shell, and the design was presented at the USENIX conference in Boulder in January 1980. In 1985, Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant started The WELL from Sausalito, California. Its own history page says Howard Rheingold coined "virtual community" there and that members went on to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Craigslist.

Jarkko Oikarinen added chat for the open Internet. In his own history, he writes that "The birthday of IRC was in August 1988," at the University of Oulu in Finland, as recorded by Daniel Stenberg. IRC averaged 12 users on 38 servers in July 1990, and in early 1991, during the Gulf War, it saw more than 300 concurrent users for the first time.

All of these shared one limit. A person was a username on one machine, and communities were small, technical and local. You couldn't bring your friends with you, because the system had no idea who your friends were.

For teams today: every durable online group had a host who set the tone and a topic worth returning to. If your internal channels feel empty, check whether anyone is hosting them.

The Profile Rush (1997-2005)

Real names and friend lists arrive

The picture of this era is a web page with a photo, a name and a list of friends. The change was identity: people now appeared as themselves, and the site recorded who they knew.

The first to build a company on that idea was SixDegrees. Andrew Weinreich and a team of co-inventors filed a patent application on 17 January 1997 for a "networking database" in which relationships are confirmed or denied by the other person, the database growing as members email people to join. The patent was granted on 16 January 2001.

Friendster followed. Jonathan Abrams filed a patent on 16 June 2003, granted 27 June 2006, for a system that reveals the chains of connections between any two people, out to a chosen number of degrees of separation. LinkedIn had already opened. Its own page says it went public on 5 May 2003 after starting in 2002 in the home of co-founder Reid Hoffman. Microsoft later announced a $26.2 billion all-cash deal on 13 June 2016, when LinkedIn had more than 433 million members.

MySpace showed how fast attention could move. When News Corp. agreed on 18 July 2005 to buy its parent, Intermix, InformationWeek reported a $580 million cash price, and that MySpace's unique visitors had risen from 1.2 million to 17.7 million in a year, according to comScore. It had launched less than two years earlier.

Meanwhile, Pew Research Center records that in February 2005 only 5% of American adults used a social networking site. The new problem was that these sites were separate islands. Each wanted you to rebuild your friend list from scratch, and the one that made joining effortless would win.

For teams today: professional profiles still shape hiring and sales. If you sell B2B, the LinkedIn profile and the company page are part of your pipeline, whatever your website says.

The Facebook Years (2004-2012)

A dorm project becomes the default network

Open with a Harvard dorm in February 2004. The Harvard Crimson reported that Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard student, had launched thefacebook.com after about a week of coding, and that over 650 students had registered. He told the paper that "each user's experience improves if they can get their friends to join it." That sentence is a plain description of a network effect, a service that gains value as more people use it.

Two years later Facebook changed how a social site worked. Fortune recalls that News Feed launched late on 5 September 2006, when the site had about 10 million users. Before it, you had to visit friends' profiles to see what had changed. After it, updates came to you. A group called "I Hate the News Feed, Turn It Off" passed a million members within a day, and Zuckerberg's reply began "Calm down. Breathe. We hear you." The feed stayed. It's the first big example of a platform deciding what you see.

Others built on different ideas. Twitter began in March 2006. In April 2010 the Library of Congress announced that it would archive every public tweet since then, at a time when Twitter carried more than 50 million a day. On 9 October 2006, Google announced it would acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock, and that YouTube would keep its brand and operate independently. Video was now part of the social web.

Money followed attention. Facebook's ad products followed, a story told in The History of Online Advertising. On 4 October 2012, Facebook said more than one billion people were using it each month.

The new problem was dependence. A company's audience now lived on someone else's platform, where the rules and the reach could change overnight.

For teams today: treat a social following as rented land. Keep a way to reach your audience directly, such as an email list.

The Pocket and the Feed (2010-2020)

Phones make it constant, and ranking replaces the follow

Picture a phone held in one hand on a train: a photo, a like, a swipe. This era overlaps the Facebook years, because the phone changed what Facebook was. By 2012, mobile photo-sharing had become big enough for Facebook to act. On 9 April 2012 it announced it would acquire Instagram for approximately $1 billion in cash and shares, calling it "a fun, popular photo-sharing app for mobile devices."

Adoption kept rising. Pew's first measurement in 2005 found 5% of American adults on a social site. By August 2011 it was 50%, the first time half of adults used one, and by 2021 72% said they did.

The deeper change was in the feed. On 18 June 2020, TikTok published how its For You feed works. It ranks videos by user interactions, video information such as captions and sounds, and device and account settings. It says follower count is not a direct factor, and "there's no one For You feed." Earlier feeds showed posts by people you chose. This one shows what you're likely to watch, whoever made it.

This created the era's new problem: reach no longer depends on your audience. A brand with few followers can reach millions, and one with many can reach almost no one.

For teams today: write for the content, not the follower count. Test short, specific posts, and read the retention numbers, because that's what these feeds reward.

Rules and Machines (2018-present)

Open protocols, new law and generated content arrive together

This era overlaps the last, because the feeds kept growing while people began to build alternatives and regulators began to answer them.

In the open-standards camp, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published ActivityPub as a Recommendation on 23 January 2018, edited by Christine Lemmer-Webber and Jessica Tallon. It defines a decentralized social networking protocol in which servers run by different parties deliver content to each other. That is the old IRC and Usenet idea of many servers, with modern accounts and profiles. The standards story runs through the history of the World Wide Web.

In law, the European Union adopted Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, the Digital Services Act, on 19 October 2022. It applies generally from 17 February 2024, with some provisions applying from 16 November 2022. Its recitals set the threshold for the largest services at 45 million average monthly users in the Union, a number equal to 10% of the EU population.

And in the platforms themselves, generated content is now a product question. In a 1 October 2026 post, TikTok says it added a feature that lets people choose how much AI-generated content they want to see, and that it has labeled over three billion videos as AI generated. Adoption remains high: Pew's 2026 survey finds 84% of US adults use YouTube, 70% use Facebook and about half use Instagram.

The open problem is trust. When anyone, or any model, can produce a convincing post, the platform has to decide what to show, and now it has to explain that choice to a regulator.

For teams today: keep a written policy for AI-generated posts and disclosures. Our guides on AI social media marketing and AI disclosure in advertising cover how to set one.

Key People

Key Facts

Key Facts: Social Media History

• Community Memory's first terminal stood in a Berkeley record store in 1973 and the project ran until 1992, per the Computer History Museum.
• PLATO Notes was extended on 7 August 1973 to allow up to 63 responses per note, according to Living Internet.
• US bulletin boards grew from about 5,000 in 1988 to about 25,000 in 1992, per the ETHW.
• Only 5% of US adults used social networking sites in February 2005, and 50% did by 2011, per Pew Research Center.
• Facebook reported more than one billion monthly active users on 4 October 2012, per Facebook.
• The EU Digital Services Act applies generally from 17 February 2024, per EUR-Lex.

The Pattern Behind the History

This is our synthesis of the timeline, not published research. Four shifts repeat.

1. Place to profile. Early groups were rooms on one machine. Later ones were pages about people.
2. Group to graph. Chat rooms organized conversations by topic. Friend lists organized them by relationship.
3. Graph to feed. Seeing your friends' posts gave way to seeing whatever is predicted to hold your attention.
4. Feed to rulebook. Once the feed decides what millions read, law steps in to set duties for the platform.

What It Teaches Teams Today

• Own a channel. Every platform in this story changed the rules for reach. Keep a direct line to your audience.
• Host your communities. The WELL and the BBS operators kept people because someone cared for the room. Internal communities need the same care. Our piece on culture in remote and hybrid teams goes into how.
• Plan for the ranking, not the follower. Content strategy now means writing for a feed's signals. See AI content strategy.
• Know your rulebook. If you serve EU users at scale, disclosure and content duties are law, not preference.

For how software moved onto this network, see The History of SaaS, and for how people find content once it's posted, The History of SEO.

The long view says social media is a very old habit on increasingly powerful machines. The tools changed from letters to terminals to feeds, but the question stayed the same: who gets heard, by whom, and who decides.