Some Thoughts on Social Media's Place in History

It seemed so innocent when it first came on the scene. I first got Facebook around 2005 or 2006. I shut my account down some time ago now and am not going to go digging through old emails to try to figure out if I can pinpoint exactly when I signed up, but I can say that it was shortly after the then new social media platform came to Stanford, where I was a grad student. It wasn’t much back then: a “wall” your friends could write on, the abilities to write on your “wall” and to “poke” people virtually, and a basic profile with a picture and whatever information users decided to provide.

But make no mistake: this approach to social networking was never entirely innocent. Mark Zuckerberg himself, early on, reportedly told a friend people were “dumb fucks” for handing over so much information to him. He was a 19-year-old doofus and most likely did not have a grand evil plan, but before long, the privacy concerns became very real—and for a long time, I ignored those concerns, and went on blithely taking quizzes to determine what breed of cat I was or what my superpower would be if I had one.

Following up on last week’s election postmortem (check out the related piece I published at Religion Dispatches as well), my thoughts have been restlessly wandering all over the place, but I ultimately settled on writing about the rise of social media and its initially latent, and then all too obvious political impact for two reasons. The first, if I’m being honest, is that it keeps me from having to think too much just now about the parade of horrors we’re seeing in Donald Trump’s cabinet picks. Although I held up better after this year’s election results than I did after Trump’s (Electoral College but not popular vote) win in 2016, it’s still a lot, and I have to take breaks from following the blow-by-blow.

The second reason, though, is a serious and, I think, perfectly valid one. Although social media has occupied some notable space in our national conversation in recent years, I don’t think we’ve remotely fully digested the power with which it, and those who have the power and money to shape it, have shaped this moment. We’re probably not even capable of fully digesting the significance of social media in recent history and current events at this time, because we’re still living through it. But we can certainly ask what changed—in terms of the platforms themselves, but also in American society—between earlier iterations of social media and the massive platforms of web 2.0 that made the incredible destructive potential of social media that was realized in 2016 and again in 2024 possible.

I’m not the world’s most tech-savvy individual, but I am a trained historian—Stanford PhD 2012—and I’m a decent social observer. And I’m starting to formulate some ideas about what got us here and where there might have been off-ramps we failed to take, in the hopes that whatever insights I have might be useful in some better, or at least more hopeful, future.

In what follows, rather than go through the precise abuses of social media companies and corporate users in detail—the gathering and weaponization of big data by Cambridge Analytica and other bad actors (also a factor in 2016’s Brexit vote), the Russian troll farms and the spread of disinformation by actors foreign, domestic, and whatever Elon Musk is (for all we know, his body mass could be about half ketamine by now)—I am going to assume readers have a basic grasp of those things. That way, I can focus on social media in its immediate historical, social, and political contexts. If you are not, however, familiar with these issues at least in their broad outlines, you may want to stop and do some Googling, or what follows may seem very abstract.

To be clear, I do not think that the spread of memes and disinformation via Musk’s “X” (formerly Twitter) was the decisive factor in the 2024 election, but I don’t doubt that it played a role. More importantly, though, I think that the abuse of social media has hastened the decline of American civil society and the ongoing collapse of American democracy, such as it was. And there are many abusive actors: tech company executives themselves are guilty of both abuse and neglect, but other culpable parties include big data harvesters, foreign actors that wish the United States ill, corporations and political organizations that advertise on social media, and more.

A (Very) Brief History of Social Media

Future historians will undoubtedly debate what should count as the first social media platform. Was it MySpace (2003)? Yahoo Groups (2001), many of whose users also once upon a time communicated via Yahoo Instant Messenger (a 1998 answer to AOL’s 1997 AOL Instant Messenger, which was itself an answer to ICQ, which debuted in 1996)? Internet forums (and if these include Usenet groups, then they go way back to the early 1980s)? Was it those BBSes we used to log onto via dialup modems when I was in middle school, when you always ran the risk that your daily play session of Legend of the Red Dragon could be cut short by your dad picking up the phone?

However the question of the “first” social media platform may be settled (or, more likely, endlessly disputed), there are some factors that sharply distinguish the era of Facebook and Twitter from what came before. BBSes sometimes connected distant users via FidoNet or Usenet, but many were limited to people within a certain geographic range. Forums were generally not meant to reach masses of people united by nothing in particular, even after AOL opened up the world of the internet to the masses in what came in the nerd circles of Yore to be known as “eternal September.”

That lingo itself came from the fact that most people who had access to Usenet and early BBSes had that access via professional roles, often associated with universities. In September, you’d always get an influx of new student users, who would have to be onboarded and socialized into the etiquette that the preexisting user base in their online niches expected of them. Gatekeeping of this sort was no longer possible when AOL brought the world wide web to the people. Well, to some of them—access was still highly uneven in the United States according to race, class, neighborhood, etc., but this was the first period in which the internet got a massive, and continuous, influx of new users. That created some chaos and the conditions for some kinds of online abuse, but it seems to me that this era of internet access did more good than harm.

In any case, no one had yet managed to unite all of these users, or anything remotely close to all of them, into a one-ring sort of situation. That’s a big part of what distinguishes the early web from the era of Facebook, Twitter, and eventually Instagram (2010), and is also, I think, one of the things that is insidious about FB. The web was still a place for niches, and most people went to it for information and perhaps some entertainment (and porn obviously). Many users didn’t create their own content, or at least not in any context that would allow it to go viral. Some of us built basic websites via platforms like GeoCities. (I did in college, and if you remember, you remember—if not, it’s not that important for the purposes of this essay.)

Anonymity was also the norm. That has continued in some parts of web 2.0, but not on Facebook, where Zuckerberg literally demands that people register with their real names. Everyone who complied gave away a lot of information desired by marketers and that, as it turned out, could be easily misused by malicious political actors as well. Whoops. For its part, Twitter had many anonymous users, but its draw was that it gave you direct access to journalists, writers, artists, and celebrities, who were there under their real names and often verified. To be sure, Twitter created the conditions that fostered cyber harassment and stalking, making it easier for trolls to dox people.

But Twitter was immensely useful in part because it let people share and observe things that were happening in realtime—you could follow news as it broke, or even get helpful intel in the middle of a political protest, or simply learn what was happening at the protest through pictures and video uploaded by participants. This feature had a lot of potential for pro-democracy activists, so I suppose we should never have expected billionaire tech bros to let it last.

My thanks to my friend Matt, aka thesnarkygent, for helping me write this section. He’s cool and way more tech savvy than me.

How Things Changed

In terms of historical developments, which often unfold over decades, generations, or even centuries, the internet has obviously evolved with extreme rapidity. Facebook launched, albeit on a limited scale, in 2004. Twitter came along two years later, and, although it never had the massive user base that Facebook would eventually acquire, but because of who its user base was, and what their interests were, it did have some claim to being the world’s “town square.”

MySpace launched in 2003, and yet it feels almost like an entirely distinct era in social media. Facebook eclipsed it in popularity in 2008, and soon after it was irrelevant. Before that, however, it never felt like the kind of place that could be used for community or political organizing, for which even Facebook had some utility once upon a time. It was the place you promoted your (probably decidedly mediocre) favorite local bands. It was the place where unserious people filled their pages with so many silly gifs that the load would crash your browser or even your entire computer. It wasn’t political, really.

I’m not sure whether Zuckerberg really meant for Facebook to be political per se—probably not, since he’s an insufferable rich boy “good vibes only” type—but as soon as people could see what their relatives and old friends believed, the political fights got very heated. That’s a data point I think it’s worth thinking about when it comes to American “polarization” (not my favorite framing because, while we are polarized, this seems to imply that both poles are to blame when it’s the stubborn, white supremacist patriarchal right that has viciously and relentlessly driven the polarization while calling everyone else “divisive” and “political”).

For Facebook and Twitter to be used to their worst possible ends, I think, it was necessary for them to appear in a media environment in which the fairness doctrine had already been eliminated (that happened in 1987), and FOX News and right-wing talk radio had become wildly successful at promoting bad-faith takes and conspiracy theories for over a decade. But even as these platforms added new features to make them even more useful for malevolent actors, those actors were somewhat slow to pick up on their potential—not for marketing purposes, of course, but for explicitly and directly political purposes.

Facebook’s strength, I think, lay in being the sort of bland “good vibes only” platform it became once it was opened up to everyone, and not only students—in 2006. The draw was that you wondered, of course, whatever happened to those people from your childhood you moved away from or drifted apart from. How are the second cousins you used to have Christmas with doing these days? Don’t you want to see your middle school best friend’s baby pictures? I mean, don’t you?

To have all of that easily, without having to pick up the phone—well, specifically without having to make a call—was like a siren song. And when you saw others sharing information probably best not shared in public, you felt compelled to share too. To document your life and to show everyone how happy you are because YOU ARE DEFINITELY HAPPY AND HAVING A FABULOUS LIFE GODDAMMIT. A particularly harmful sort of “keeping up with the Joneses” impulse was one of FB’s emergent properties. And then, one day, you woke up and realized that, even if you *should* leave FB because the company is terrible and doing nefarious things with your information, well, everyone is there, and YOU WANT TO SEE THE PICTURES OF YOUR MIDDLE SCHOOL BEST FRIEND’S NEW BABY—DON’T YOU?

It’s really sort of amazing, in retrospect, how well that worked to bring users in and keep them there and active.

And then, the political use of all that personal information, once used primarily for targeted marketing, was something that would naturally become more of interest to right-wingers and the ultra-wealthy as their power seemed threatened, first after the election of the first and so far only African American president, Barack Obama, in 2008—I remember seeing people in my old evangelical circles on Facebook asserting that he was or might be the Antichrist—and then after his reelection in 2012 and the Arab Spring of two years later showed how threatening social media, Twitter in particular, could be to oligarchs and dictators.

That, I think, is critical social context for understanding what happened in and after 2016. And up to that point, I think, most of this happened more or less organically, in an emergent manner. The reaction of 2016 (which also came, let’s not forget, after Obergefell), as it played out with respect to social media, was when we began to see a much more conscious effort by the powerful to limit social media’s capacity for furthering social justice.

Through any of these developments, did we have an off-ramp? Until we were conscious of the problem, it’s hard to say that we did. But from 2016 on, there were a couple of efforts I’m aware of that were squelched in their infancy. Neither Twitter’s nor Facebook’s leadership ever seemed genuinely interested in trying to rein in disinformation, and the Right’s “working of the refs” affected them the same way it has the legacy media, leading them to side more often with right-wing “free speech” arguments than with liberals or leftists and to try to placate conservatives who claimed they suffered “discrimination” because they couldn’t call people their favorite slurs. Just look at the absurdity of how Facebook implemented “fact-checking.” And after massive outcry and severe harm done (gamergate in 2014-15), for example, Twitter occasionally banned some of the worst actors, eventually including even Trump himself—though Musk let them back on when he bought the platform in 2022.

Because of the relevant research I was publishing at the time, I was invited to participate in a meeting hosted by a human rights and civil society non-profit in Washington DC in late 2016 where the topic was countering social media disinformation. The primary solution considered was to find ways to build networks and channels of communication between experts, civil society organizations, and social media networks to strategize about keeping social media fair, democratic, and as free as possible of political misinformation. The fatal flaw in that approach, at the end of the day, was the assumption that the leaders of the “broligarchy” had any interest in the preservation of democracy.

If there was an off-ramp here, its fate was in the hands of people like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg—inconceivably wealthy and powerful white men who either couldn’t see the problem or just didn’t care. These men were never going to come to the table in a serious way with civil society actors and unbiased experts to save democracy.

The last stand of something like this approach, I think, occurred in 2022 when President Joe Biden created the Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Homeland Security. Disinfo expert Nina Jankowicz served briefly as director before FOX News created enough of an outcry (causing intense harrassment of Jankowicz) that the Biden administration shut the new program down. I know Jankowicz a little and once got to hang out with her in person in Indianapolis (she gave a talk there during a time when I was living “back home”). She’s a woman I’d vouch for not only as a serious expert on political disinformation, but also as the kind of person who wants to be a public servant for the right reasons, and what happened to her is deplorable.

And that’s where we are now, in a pretty dark place relative to the proliferation of a post-truth ethos online—and post-truth politics always and only benefits authoritarians. If there’s one bright spot to highlight before concluding this essay, however, it’s this. No social media platform lasts forever. Facebook and X are losing users, many of whom are flocking to a new, and for now at least healthier social media model that embodies the best of old Twitter on Bluesky. It’s the platform I currently use most, and its current surge of growth seems like a good thing—although only time will tell. Whatever happens, it won’t be an immediate panacea for an ignorant, conspiracy-addled, and angry America. But if we’re lucky, maybe someday we’ll see the rise of Bluesky as a data point in an analysis more optimistic than this one.

I don’t think people are going to stop trying to find ways to connect and exchange ideas online, so social media as such is probably not going to die. I guess that’s a reason to hope a model does emerge that minimizes the harmful aspects of the internet and promotes those that could foster democracy. For now, anyway, I’ll stick around on Bluesky, and I’ll hope it never follows in the sinister footsteps of its forebears. There are reasons to think it might not that have to do with “the fediverse” (which I am not going to try to define or explain in an essay that is already too long), and for now, I’ll leave it at that.

I’m still fighting a sinus cold (though, knock on wood, I’m feeling much better and like I’ve made significant progress in my recovery), so I apologize if this isn’t the most coherent essay I’ve ever written. The Bugbear Dispatch is still a one-person operation, but I hope these thoughts I’ve just tapped out might spark some discussion in the comments and/or on social media. Am I completely wrong about some of this? All of it? Tell me why!

And with that, dear readers, I wish you all a lovely weekend. Take care of yourself and give yourself breaks as needed from thinking about American news and politics.

The Bugbear Dispatch extends a special thanks to our founding subscribers Jody, Ryan Boren, Katie in Seattle, Kel, Roslyn Reid, Rob B. and anonymous for their generous financial support of this publication.