It’s sometimes difficult to remember a time before Facebook, isn’t it? It’s like trying to remember a time before the espresso martini (invented by mixologist Dick Bradsell in Soho in 1983) or a time when people smoked on planes (amazingly, that was allowed until the late 1990s), or that time, many ages past, so long ago it is lost in the fogs of ancient memory, when the Tories were relatively popular (2022).

However, there was a time before Facebook and it was 20 years ago today: 4 February 2004 was the date when a young Mark Zuckerberg launched the site from his Harvard dorm. His second stab at the idea, this time he called it thefacebook.com and he sold it as a way for students to socialise online. Right from the start ‘The Facebook’ was notably successful: by the end of June that same year, Zuck’s baby had 250,000 subscribers. By the end of the following year, it had an estimated six million users – and it was expanding at remarkable speed.

The first reason social media platforms succeed is this: they are scarily, dangerously addictive

Since then it has gone from notably successful to completely and outrageously successful, becoming one of the most triumphantly popular ‘products’ of all time. You may, like many, have a slight contemporary disdain for Facebook, seeing it as a sad ghetto for demented old friends who never understood Twitter and/or never got with the TikTokkers and who still insist on nattering into the blue-themed void about their pets, kids, cars, hobbies, piles, brilliant personal wokeness. But the fact is Facebook is still massive.

Renamed as Meta, Facebook the company is now worth about $1 trillion (£800 billion). To get your head around that number, that means Meta is bigger than the GDP of Poland, Argentina or Taiwan. If it was a national economy it would make the top 20, just behind Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, an estimated three billion people use some form of Meta everyday (not least WhatsApp messaging, currently dominating UK political discourse, via the Covid Inquiry).

Of course, Facebook is not alone. Social media now pervades human society, culture, politics, academe, the arts, everything, via the top twenty global social media platforms. They are so famous we can all name them, easily. If you are into style, fashion, travel, or you want to sell your lifestyle as an influencer, then you need to be on Instagram (also owned by Meta). If you are aged 10 to 25, then it is fairly essential to be on TikTok, so you can be manipulated by the Chinese (who do not allow TikTok in China). If you want to argue about niche things then you need Reddit; if you want to talk about videos about niche things then you need Youtube – then there’s Snapchat, Pinterest, Linkedin, and so forth.

Many people will have one chosen social media platform they use above all others. As a writer and journalist who really likes an argument, mine, unsurprisingly, is Twitter/X. This also happens to be the most controversial social media platform, perhaps because it is the most politically powerful. As such, it provides an exemplary answer as to why ‘social media’ as a whole is so incredibly successful, when, after all, these things didn’t exist a few decades ago.

We really didn’t feel the need for them, did we, back in the day? I mean – do you remember your grandmother ever saying ‘I wish I could tell anonymous people I have never met why I despise their opinions on suede shoes, while showing them a photo of me nibbling a biscuit’? No, she didn’t say that, yet here we are – doing all that.

Mark Zuckerberg (Credit: Getty images)

The first reason social media platforms succeed is this: they are scarily, dangerously addictive. They brilliantly plug into our need for gossip, jokes, diversions, debates, interaction, the latest news. This is as much a human hunger as hunger itself. Humans have evolved and succeeded as information gatherers, the caveman with the best sense of the tribal pecking order, or the whereabouts of the juiciest gazelle, is the caveman that prospered and had more cave-kids. Social media feeds us this, and often adds a dopamine hit as an extra, habit-forming incentive via the infamous ‘Like’ button (invented in 2007).

The second reason social media succeeds is because once these platforms reach a certain size, they become almost irreplaceable due to network effects. Again, Twitter/X is the best example. When it was taken over by Elon Musk various silly people tried to get everyone to move to places like ‘Mastodon’, Threads or Bluesky. But this didn’t work because the sort of people who hate Elon Musk so much they will move to Mastodon (lol) are a very particular and cranky breed. As a result, Mastodon instantly became a sad echo chamber full of anti-Muskites agreeing how awful Musk is. But people go on Twitter specifically to meet different views, news, jokes and opinions so they can get the dopamine hit of anger, dispute and irritation and have a long pointless row with someone they’ve never met about suede shoes.

Seen this way, Twitter/X is like some vast Trafalgar Square full of ten million babbling people. Trafalgar Square cannot easily be replaced: you can’t just say ‘Right, from now on we’re all going to forget Trafalgar Square and we will officially assemble and talk outside that cinema in Swindon.’ Lots of people will think you are mad, few will follow, and so Twitter/X endures, despite Musk allowing Katie Hopkins back on to the site.

The conclusion? For very many people – often including me – social media is an evil or pernicious thing, horribly addictive, corrosive of trust and real friendship, and the world would be better if it had not been invented. But you can say the same of alcohol. And yet, alcohol has been around for 12,000 years and isn’t going anywhere, presumably because it answers some human need nothing else can fulfil. So we should probably accept social media will be with us for several more decades, at the very least. I know right?