Social Media and Disinformation

As an older millennial, I was in the first generation to truly grow up with social media. I was on MySpace with my obligatory friend Tom. I was a freshman in college when Facebook first came into existence and I was one of the earliest adopters in April 2004. Facebook was started at Harvard and initially became a college–only social media site. Originally at thefacebook.com, the site expanded to other colleges, and I was at one of the first dozen or so colleges to which they expanded. You had to have a .edu email address from one of the colleges or Universities to create an account.

Initially, Facebook was just used as a platform to exchange messages with friends and upload photos. Then they rolled out the “newsfeed” feature. This was really the beginning of true “media” in social media as we know it. I remember the day that they added that feature, and debating with my brother about the merits of having such a constant stream of updates and what might come of that. We talked about the potential downsides of having all of this information — back then which was often more personal information that we were posting about our lives as messages to our closest friends — scrolling by on the pages of everyone else to whom we were connected. One thing that we both agreed on was that the “newsfeed” would be a game changer and that, regardless of what we thought, the proverbial horse was out of the barn and social media would never be the same.

The one thing that we truly didn’t realize at the time was that this would not just impact social…