The Tool Desk
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What counts as social media?
There is no single universally binding definition, so a useful way to identify social media is to look at what people can do on a service. It is generally social when users can publish or contribute content, maintain a profile or persistent identity, connect with others or join communities, and interact through sharing, comments, messages, ratings, or recommendations. Discovery may come from a social network, a search, or an algorithmic feed.
A service need not be public to be social. Private messages and closed groups can support ongoing relationships and community. Nor does every site with a comment box become a social-media platform: the central purpose and the range of user-to-user features matter.
| Service or category | Usually social media? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Facebook, Instagram, TikTok | Yes | Profiles, feeds, sharing, and interaction are central features. |
| YouTube | Yes, broadly | People publish videos, subscribe to creators, comment, livestream, and discover recommendations. |
| Reddit and Discord communities | Yes | Users participate in topic-based communities and conversations. |
| Usually included | It is primarily private messaging, but groups and broadcasts support social communication. | |
| Yes | Professional profiles, connections, publishing, and messaging form a network. | |
| Newspaper website | Usually not by itself | Its main function is editorial publishing, even if it offers comments or sharing. |
| Personal blog or review site | It depends | It may be mostly one-way publishing, or it may develop into an interactive community. |
| Online multiplayer game | Sometimes | Social features may be substantial, though gameplay can remain the main service. |
The boundaries are functional, not fixed. A service can blend publishing, messaging, commerce, entertainment, and community.
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How social media developed
Social media did not come from a single inventor or one defining app. It grew from several overlapping developments: bulletin-board systems, forums and chat rooms; blogs and personal publishing; profile-based online communities; instant messaging; smartphones; user-generated video and photos; recommendation systems; and digital advertising.
- Early online communities: Forums, bulletin boards, chat rooms, and blogs let people gather around interests and publish beyond traditional media.
- Profile-based networks: In the 2000s, large services made personal profiles, friend or follower connections, and activity feeds mainstream.
- Mobile-first use: Smartphones and apps made uploading, messaging, watching, and checking feeds a constant, on-the-go activity.
- Ranked discovery: Many services moved beyond purely chronological timelines, using ranking and recommendation to choose what appears.
- Convergence: Social platforms increasingly combine video, search, messaging, livestreams, news, shopping, advertising, and creator tools.
The result is better understood as an interaction and distribution layer across the internet than as a list of social-network websites.
Major types of social media
Many platforms fit more than one category. The categories below describe their common use, not an exclusive classification.
Social networking
These services organize profiles, connections, groups, feeds, and personal updates. Facebook is used for a mix of relationships, groups, pages, and media; LinkedIn centers on work identities, professional connections, company pages, and recruiting.
Photo and video sharing
These services center on visual publishing and viewing, often with comments, subscriptions, remixing, livestreams, and creator accounts. Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are examples, but they differ in formats, audiences, and discovery systems.
Discussion and community platforms
Topic-focused services organize conversations into communities, threads, channels, or forums. Reddit and Discord communities are examples. Participation may be pseudonymous; real-name profiles are not required for a service to be social.
Messaging and group communication
Messaging services support private or group text, voice, video, file sharing, and sometimes broadcast channels. WhatsApp is an example. This category is less publicly visible than an open feed, but still supports social networks and communities.
Microblogging and public conversation
These services emphasize short posts, replies, reposts, hashtags, and timely public discussion. X, Threads, and Bluesky are examples. Visibility and audience controls differ by service.
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Professional, creator, and commerce networks
Professional networks support employment identity, industry publishing, and recruiting. Creator and livestreaming services help people build an audience through videos, subscriptions, memberships, donations, sponsorships, or live interaction. Social commerce and review communities combine recommendations, reviews, product discovery, and sometimes shopping in the same experience.
How feeds, recommendations, and advertising work
On many services, a feed is not simply a list of everything posted by accounts a person follows. Ranking systems select and order material; recommendation systems can introduce content from outside a user’s network. Search results respond to an explicit query, while notifications prompt people to return. Chronological feeds, ranked feeds, recommendations, search, and notifications serve different functions.
Platforms use different systems, and their signals and objectives can change. Common inputs may include recent activity, previous interactions, watch time or completion, recency, relationship strength, topic similarity, language, approximate location, selected interests, safety or quality signals, and advertising objectives. “Algorithmic” does not mean random, but neither does it mean that a platform knows exactly what a user wants. A ranked system optimizes for objectives set by the service and advertisers, with platform-specific rules and trade-offs.
Advertising is often integrated into feeds or video, and may be targeted using audience attributes or platform activity. Major ad systems generally do not have one universal price for a post. LinkedIn describes its advertising as auction- and objective-based, with billing tied to the campaign’s applicable billable event or bidding model (LinkedIn Ads pricing). Meta offers advertiser-set budgets and schedules for Facebook and Instagram; actual costs vary by objective, audience, creative, placement, and auction conditions (Meta for Business).
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- Relationships and belonging: Keeping in touch across distance, joining interest groups, and finding peer support.
- Entertainment and discovery: Watching videos, following creators, exploring interests, and sharing humor or art.
- Learning and work: Following professional communities, finding educational material, recruiting, and developing expertise.
- News and public information: Seeing updates from news organizations, public agencies, witnesses, and community groups. Pew reports that Facebook and YouTube are among the leading platforms where U.S. adults regularly get news, while TikTok’s role as a news source has grown over time; “regularly get news” is not the same measure as overall platform use (Pew Research Center’s Social Media and News Fact Sheet).
- Expression and civic life: Sharing identity, organizing events, raising funds, discussing issues, and participating in activism.
- Business and creative work: Promoting products or services, answering customers, finding an audience, and earning through creator tools or partnerships.
These uses can overlap in a single session: someone may message a friend, watch a creator, see an advertisement, and encounter a news clip without leaving one app.
Benefits—and what they depend on
Social media can make communication inexpensive and fast, help people find niche communities, and give small organizations or independent creators a route to audiences they could not reach through traditional channels alone. It can support emergency updates, mutual aid, public education, professional networking, and direct feedback between organizations and customers.
Those benefits are possibilities, not guarantees. They depend on the content a person encounters, the quality of moderation, the audience and relationships a service enables, accessibility, and how the platform distributes material. A large audience is not necessarily a useful one, and a highly visible post is not necessarily accurate or helpful.
Risks: privacy, information quality, abuse, and control
Privacy and data collection
Platforms may collect or infer information from activity, interactions, devices, interests, and other signals, then use it for advertising, recommendations, or other purposes. Privacy settings can limit some visibility, but they do not control every form of collection, inference, retention, or sharing. Screenshots, forwarding, third-party collection, policy changes, and other users’ actions can also defeat assumptions about who will see a post.
In September 2024, an FTC staff report said major social-media and video-streaming companies engaged in extensive data collection and had inadequate safeguards for children and teenagers. That is a staff report’s finding, not a blanket final legal judgment about every company or practice (FTC press release; FTC staff report).
Misinformation and context
Feeds can surface false claims, misleading edits, manipulated or AI-generated media, coordinated influence efforts, and rumors that travel faster than corrections. A follower count or viral post is not proof of authority. Before sharing consequential information, look for the original source, date, evidence, independent corroboration, and whether the item is reporting, opinion, advertising, satire, or speculation.
Harassment and abuse
Abuse can include bullying, threats, dogpiling, doxxing, impersonation, stalking, hate speech, non-consensual intimate imagery, and coordinated attacks on accounts. Blocking, muting, restricting replies, and reporting can help, but serious threats or recurring abuse may require preserving evidence and seeking help from trusted people or relevant authorities.
Compulsive use and well-being
Some people experience compulsive checking, lost sleep, difficulty stopping, or interference with school, work, or relationships. Notifications and unpredictable rewards can encourage repeated checking. Heavy use by itself is not a clinical diagnosis of addiction.
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Evidence about mental health is not a single universal verdict. Effects may differ by age, platform, content, social context, vulnerability, and pattern of use; active participation and passive scrolling are not necessarily equivalent. The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory raises concern about potential effects on young people while noting important limits in the evidence base. It cites surveys in which up to 95% of U.S. adolescents aged 13–17 reported using a social-media platform and teenagers averaged 3.5 hours a day on social media in one survey. These are survey findings cited in the advisory, not measurements of every teenager or proof that social-media use alone causes a particular outcome (U.S. Surgeon General advisory).
Commercial influence and platform dependence
A service with no monetary subscription fee may still be supported by advertising, commerce, subscriptions, creator tools, or the collection and use of personal data. Sponsored posts, affiliate links, influencer partnerships, and native advertising can resemble ordinary recommendations; material connections should be disclosed. For creators and businesses, platform rules or technical changes can also reduce reach, interrupt monetization, or cut off account access. An audience built only on one service is vulnerable to algorithm changes, moderation errors, hacking, or a platform closing.
Using social media more safely
- Secure the account: Use a unique password stored in a password manager, enable multifactor authentication, and keep a recovery email address or phone number current.
- Review exposure settings: Check audience, privacy, location, contact syncing, tagging, and advertising controls. Remove third-party app connections you no longer use.
- Limit sensitive material: Avoid posting information that could expose your home, routine, finances, account access, or another person’s privacy.
- Watch for fraud: Treat urgent direct messages and unexpected requests for money or codes as suspicious. Verify a link and the sender before signing in or responding.
- Use moderation tools: Block, mute, restrict, limit comments, or report unwanted behavior. Save evidence of threats or harassment before content disappears.
- Set personal boundaries: Turn off nonessential notifications, define times to check feeds, and protect sleep and focused work.
- Check before sharing: Verify consequential claims against original and independent sources, and identify advertising or manipulated content.
- Keep copies and options: Preserve important content before deleting an account, and avoid making a platform the only home for customer contacts or creative work.
No privacy setting makes a post completely private. People can copy, forward, or capture content, and a service’s data practices are not limited to what appears in a profile.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How parents can approach teenagers’ use
A useful family conversation is about readiness and real effects, rather than only a blanket ban or unrestricted access. Consider age and development, sleep and school, harmful or sexual content, bullying, body-image pressure, location sharing, contact with strangers, and whether the teen can disengage. Ask whether online activity is displacing offline relationships or other activities, and make sure the young person has a trusted adult to contact if something goes wrong.
The Surgeon General frames youth safety as a shared responsibility for families, young people, researchers, technology companies, and policymakers—not solely a matter of individual self-control. Agree on age-appropriate settings and boundaries together, then revisit them as the teen’s needs and experience change (HHS advisory).
Best Value
How businesses should choose and use platforms
Businesses do not need to join every platform. Start with the audience and outcome, then select the service whose format and discovery model suit the work. Organic social activity includes publishing, responding to customers, building a community, sharing expertise, recruiting, and collecting feedback. Paid activity includes sponsored posts, lead-generation campaigns, retargeting, catalog ads, and creator partnerships.
- Define the outcome: Choose a concrete goal such as qualified leads, sales, service resolution, email signups, recruiting, or audience retention.
- Check audience and format fit: Confirm that intended customers use the platform and that the content can be made well in its native format—text, image, video, live discussion, or messaging.
- Understand discovery: Determine whether visibility comes mainly from followers, search, recommendations, communities, or paid placement.
- Assess operational load: Account for the time needed to create native content, respond, moderate, measure, and handle approvals.
- Set governance and resilience: Use shared business access rather than leaving one person with sole control, establish an approval and correction process, and maintain backups and owned channels.
- Measure meaningful outcomes: Track qualified leads, conversion rate, cost per acquisition, revenue, repeat customers, customer-service resolution, brand searches, or retention—not likes alone.
Follower count and views do not necessarily indicate business value: exposure may be incidental, repeated, low-intent, or unrelated to a purchase. Advertising costs and results also vary with objective, audience, creative, placement, bidding, and auction conditions; a fixed universal cost-per-post figure is misleading. Use the platforms’ official buying pages to review current campaign options, then confirm costs in the campaign setup.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between social media and social networking?
Social networking is one kind of social-media activity, centered on profiles and relationships. Social media is broader and also includes video publishing, messaging, discussion communities, livestreaming, and social commerce.
Is YouTube social media?
Yes, broadly. Publishing, subscriptions, comments, recommendations, and live interaction make it social, even though some viewers mainly watch videos without posting.
Is social media free?
Some services do not charge a subscription fee, but they may earn revenue through advertising, commerce, paid features, or use of data. “Free” does not mean cost-free in attention or privacy.
Can social media be used without giving up privacy?
Users can reduce exposure by limiting what they share and reviewing settings, but cannot guarantee that a post or associated data will remain private. Data collection and other users’ copying or forwarding are also factors.
What should someone do if an account is hacked?
Use the platform’s official account-recovery process, change the password from a trusted device, secure the linked email account, revoke unfamiliar app access, and enable multifactor authentication. Warn contacts if the account sent suspicious messages.
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