who created social media
There isn’t a single inventor of “social media,” but there are a few key milestones and people you can think of as its early architects.
Who created social media?
Quick Scoop
If you’re asking “who created social media,” the honest answer is: it evolved, step by step, with contributions from many different people and platforms over several decades.
Before the web: proto–social media
Long before Facebook or TikTok, people were already talking and building communities online.
- Early systems like bulletin board systems (BBS) and internet forums in the 1980s–1990s let users post messages, reply, and build ongoing discussions, much like early text-only social feeds.
- Email lists and Usenet groups functioned as topic-based communities, with threads and reputations forming around frequent posters.
These weren’t called “social media,” but they had the core idea: digital, many-to-many conversation and community.
The first true social networking site: Six Degrees
Most historians point to Six Degrees (1997) as the first real social networking platform in the modern sense.
- Founder: Andrew Weinreich , often nicknamed the “father of social networking.”
- Key features:
- User profiles
- Friend lists and connections
- The concept of degrees of separation (friends-of-friends) baked into the design.
Six Degrees didn’t survive commercially, but its structure (profiles + friends
- network graph) became the blueprint for later platforms.
Big names people often mean
When people ask “who created social media,” they often really mean “who created the biggest social platforms.”
Here are some of the most influential:
| Platform | Founders | Launch period | Why it mattered |
|---|---|---|---|
| Six Degrees | Andrew Weinreich | [1][5]1997 | [5]First widely recognized social networking site with profiles and friend networks. | [6][7][1][5]
| MySpace | Tom Anderson, Chris DeWolfe (and team) | [7]Early 2000s | [7]Brought music, personalization, and youth culture into social networking; became the biggest site before Facebook overtook it. | [7]
| Reid Hoffman and co- founders | [5]2002 | [5]Pioneered professional networking as a specific social media niche. | [5]|
| Mark Zuckerberg and co-founders | [1][7][5]2004 | [5]Turned social networking into a mainstream, global infrastructure with News Feed and a vast user base. | [1][7][5]|
| Twitter (now X) | Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Noah Glass | [3][10][1][5]2006 | [3][1][5]Popularized short “status updates” and real-time public conversation. | [10][3][1][5]
| Kevin Systrom (and team) | [3]2010 | [3]Made mobile photo-sharing and visual storytelling central to social media. | [3]|
| Snapchat | Evan Spiegel, Reggie Brown, Bobby Murphy | [10][3]2011 | [10][3]Introduced disappearing messages and “Stories,” changing how people share day-to-day life. | [10][3]
So who “invented” social media?
Putting it all together:
- No single person “created social media.” It’s the result of decades of communication tech, from forums and email lists to early networks like Six Degrees and MySpace.
- If you want one early “social networking” pioneer, Andrew Weinreich and Six Degrees (1997) are often highlighted.
- If you’re thinking of the modern era of massive social platforms, then people like Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) , Jack Dorsey and co-founders (Twitter/X) , Kevin Systrom (Instagram) and others each created major chapters in the story, not the whole thing.
In forum discussions and trending threads, the consensus is usually:
“Social media wasn’t invented by one genius in a dorm—it was built layer by layer by many founders, platforms, and communities over time.”
Today and “latest news” angle
Right now, conversations about social media’s creators are often tied to:
- Ongoing changes at X (Twitter) after Elon Musk’s acquisition and rebrand, which keeps reviving debates over who “really” shaped social networking culture.
- The rise of AI tools built into platforms (like chatbots on Snapchat or recommendation systems across apps), which shows that social media is still evolving rather than being a finished invention.
So the short, practical takeaway:
- If you need one name: Andrew Weinreich (Six Degrees, 1997) is the closest to “first social network creator.”
- If you mean the giants you know today: think of a timeline of founders , not a single inventor.
TL;DR:
Nobody single-handedly created social media. It grew from early online forums
and messaging into full social networks like Six Degrees in 1997, then
exploded with platforms such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, and
others founded by different people at different times.
Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.