Social media has only been around for just over 20 years, and began with an organisation called Yahoo GeoCities, which was created in 1995, closely followed by Classmates one year later, and the primary objectives were for students to communicate with text, images and video, using a digital platform that was hosted on the Internet.

Facebook

The true giant of social media, Facebook was the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg and few of his Harvard friends, and what began as a way for students from Harvard to communicate, soon included Colombia, Stanford and Yale, and with continued development, the platform branched out to allow anyone over the age of 13 to open an account, and Facebook is now used by literally billions of users worldwide in 140 languages. Facebook have their own marketing section and should you wish to market your business using social media platforms like Facebook, talk to the leading UK SEO agency that can be found at https://www.moveaheadmedia.co.uk/services/social-media-marketing/facebook/ and they can assist you with social media marketing, specifically Facebook.

Additional Features

Major players like Facebook have now developed their platform to allow uses to make video calls with other users, and using specialist compression software, even high-resolution video can be streamed. Social media users create a profile, giving information about themselves, which might include where they were born, where they studied, their qualifications and current employment, if they are working. Once you have created an account and a profile, you can then connect with other users and ‘friend’ each other, which means you will always see each other’s posts on your feed. Social media platforms make good use of AI technology and there have been privacy issues over the years, and there are new platforms emerging on a regular basis.

The four biggest social media platforms are:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Tik-Tok

Social Issues and Censorship

Of course, every person has the right to their own opinion, but over the years, Facebook, Google and YouTube has begun to censor content they feel is contravening their rules and regulations, which are constantly being revised to include hate speech and any type of discriminatory content. There are conspiracy theorists that believe the social media giants are in the pocket of the deep state, an alleged group of rich people who wish to control humanity, hence the censorship. The responsibilities of social media platforms are increasing, and they must employ more and more resources to police their platform, in an effort to keep things civil. One of the great things about social media is it allows you to see what your friends are doing with their lives, as their images, text and videos will show up on friends’ feeds, which helps keep people connected.

Just about everyone has at least one social media account, and national leaders either post on their Facebook page or Tweet on current affairs, not to mention the celebrities and musicians, all of whom have millions of followers. Social media is here to stay and where it will eventually lead us is anyone’s guess