18 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
British-American kickboxer and social media influencer who became one of the most searched people on the internet in 2022 for his aggressive promotion of traditional masculinity, wealth display, and anti-feminist views — subsequently facing criminal charges in Romania for human trafficking.
American technologist who co-founded Snap Inc. with Evan Spiegel and Reggie Brown at Stanford — serving as CTO — building the technical infrastructure for Snapchat's ephemeral messaging, Stories, and Spectacles hardware products.
Jonathan Abrams's Sunnyvale social networking site — the first viral social network (reaching 3 million users before MySpace or Facebook) — famous for its early traction, technical failures that drove away users, and refusal of a $30M Google acquisition offer.
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger's photo-sharing app — acquired by Facebook for $1 billion in 2012 — the defining platform for visual social media and influencer culture.
American entrepreneur — co-founder and CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook) — who built the world's most-used social media platform from a Harvard dorm room — controls Meta through supervoting shares — and has pivoted Meta toward AI and the metaverse.
Mark Zuckerberg's tech conglomerate — operator of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — creator of the Llama open-source AI models — rebranded from Facebook to Meta in 2021 with a focus on virtual reality and the metaverse.
Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe's Los Angeles social networking site — the dominant social network from 2005 to 2008 — famous for its music features, HTML customization, and its dramatic loss to Facebook.
Google's 2004 social network — created by Orkut Büyükkökten — which dominated social networking in Brazil and India before Facebook's global expansion — one of the first social networks at Google-scale infrastructure.
Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever's Mountain View Q&A platform — designed to collect the world's knowledge by having experts answer questions — an early social knowledge platform.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian's San Francisco link aggregation and discussion platform — the front page of the internet — with millions of communities covering every conceivable topic.
American competitive bodybuilder who became one of the most followed fitness creators through raw, unproduced gym vlogs — becoming a cultural phenomenon in the fitness world for his combination of extreme muscle mass, youth, and low-budget authentic content.
Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy's camera company — creator of Snapchat — notable for ephemeral messaging, Stories (later copied by Instagram and WhatsApp), and augmented reality filters.
American entrepreneur — co-founder and CEO of Reddit — who built one of the most trafficked websites in the world and returned to lead it through its 2024 IPO.
Jonathan Haidt's 2024 book — arguing that smartphone adoption and social media use after 2012 caused the global mental health crisis among adolescents — with specific recommendations for phone-free schools, delayed social media access, and free-range childhood.
Chinese short-form video platform launched globally in 2018 that became the most downloaded app in the world — introducing algorithmic content distribution independent of social graph and transforming how young people discover and consume content.
AI-powered information platform attempting to provide more comprehensive and less biased news aggregation through machine learning curation.
American comedian who built a large social media following through character-based comedy videos — particularly his parody of energy drink culture — before transitioning to stand-up.
Social media platform founded as Twitter in 2006, acquired by Elon Musk in 2022 and rebranded X — the primary global platform for real-time public intellectual discourse, political commentary, and media distribution.