Social media
Networks organised around people rather than documents reshape public life.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 5.9 years
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
Facebook launches in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006. Within a decade billions of people are connected through platforms funded by advertising and optimised for engagement. The effects are genuinely double-edged: they enabled the Arab Spring and MeToo, and they also carry coordinated disinformation, amplify outrage structurally, and are implicated in the atrocities in Myanmar and in measurable harms to adolescent mental health.