Name that app
Launched in 2011 under the name “Picaboo,” this app built around disappearing photos adopted a ghost as its logo and introduced 24-hour “Stories” in 2013.
A. Snapchat
B. Instagram
C. BeReal
What is "Snapchat"?
In 2024, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for social media platforms to carry these, like the ones on cigarette packs, and in 2025 Minnesota became the first state to pass a law requiring them.
A. Age-verification checks
B. Daily time limits
C. Mental health warning labels
What are "mental health warning labels"?
When it launched in February 2004, “TheFacebook” was open only to students at this university, where Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore.
A. Stanford
B. Yale
C. Harvard
What is "Harvard"?
Used by 84% of U.S. adults in 2025, this is the most widely used online platform in the country, according to Pew Research Center.
A. Facebook
B. Instagram
C. YouTube
What is "YouTube"?
Oxford University Press chose this phrase, for the supposed decline in a person’s mental state from consuming too much trivial online content, as its 2024 Word of the Year.
A. Doomscrolling
B. Screen fatigue
C. Brain rot
What is "brain rot"?
Launched in October 2010 with square photos and vintage-style filters, this app was bought by Facebook for $1 billion just 18 months later.
A. Pinterest
B. Instagram
C. Tumblr
What is "Instagram"?
In January 2026, TikTok’s U.S. operations moved into a new, majority-American joint venture to comply with a 2024 “divest-or-ban” law, leaving this Chinese parent company with a 19.9% stake.
A. ByteDance
B. Tencent
C. Alibaba
What is "ByteDance"?
Launched in 2003, this social network let users customize profiles with HTML and autoplaying songs, rank their “Top 8” friends, and automatically made co-founder Tom Anderson every new user’s first friend.
A. MySpace
B. Friendster
C. Xanga
What is "MySpace"?
In Pew Research Center’s 2025 teen survey, four in ten U.S. teens said they are online this often, up from 24% a decade earlier.
A. Several times a day
B. Almost constantly
C. About once a day
What is "almost constantly"?
Activist Tarana Burke founded a movement with this phrase in 2006 to support survivors of sexual violence; after actress Alyssa Milano’s October 2017 tweet, it was used more than 19 million times on Twitter in a year.
A. #MeToo
B. #TimesUp
C. #YesAllWomen
What is "#MeToo"?
In January 2025, as a U.S. TikTok ban loomed, self-described “TikTok refugees” pushed this Chinese app — whose name translates to “Little Red Book” — to No. 1 on Apple’s U.S. App Store.
A. RedNote
B. Lemon8
C. WeChat
What is "RedNote"?
In January 2025, Meta announced it would end its U.S. third-party fact-checking program on Facebook and Instagram and replace it with this crowdsourced system modeled on X’s.
A. Trust badges
B. Community Notes
C. AI content labels
What are "community notes"?
In 2018, Facebook revealed that this political consulting firm, which had worked for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, may have improperly obtained data on as many as 87 million users.
A. Palantir
B. Cambridge Analytica
C. Clearview AI
What is "Cambridge Analytica"?
In 2025, Pew found that this share of U.S. adults regularly get news on TikTok, up from just 3% in 2020.
A. About 1 in 20 (5%)
B. About 1 in 10 (10%)
C. About 1 in 5 (20%)
What is "about 1 in 5 (20%)"?
TikTok users who say “unalive” instead of “suicide” or “le dollar bean” instead of “lesbian,” to keep their videos from being suppressed by moderation systems, are using this form of speach.
A. Leetspeak
B. Algospeak
C. Doublespeak
What is "Algospeak"?
Begun in 2019 as a project funded by Twitter under Jack Dorsey, this decentralized platform opened to the public in February 2024 and added about 1 million users in a single day after the 2024 election.
A. Threads
B. Mastodon
C. Bluesky
What is "Bluesky"?
Signed in May 2025 with broad bipartisan support, this federal law makes it a crime to knowingly publish intimate images without consent, including AI-generated deepfakes, and requires platforms to remove them within 48 hours of a victim’s request.
A. TAKE IT DOWN Act
B. Kids Online Safety Act
C. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act
What is the "Take IT DOWN ACT"?
Passed in 1996 as part of the Communications Decency Act, this 26-word provision, which says online services can’t be treated as the “publisher or speaker” of what their users post, has been called “the twenty-six words that created the internet.”
A. The First Amendment
B. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act
C. Section 230
What is "Section 230"?
Pew’s 2025 survey found one of the clearest racial and ethnic gaps on this platform: 62% of Hispanic adults, 58% of Asian adults and 54% of Black adults use it, compared with 45% of White adults.
A. Facebook
B. Instagram
C. Reddit
What is "Instagram"?
Cambridge Dictionary’s 2025 Word of the Year describes the one-sided connection people feel with celebrities, influencers or even AI chatbots; sociologists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl coined it in 1956 to describe TV audiences.
A. Stan
B. Fandom
C. Parasocial
What is "Parasocial"?
Co-founded in 1999 by Omar Wasow, now a political science professor at UC Berkeley, this early social network ran alongside sister sites AsianAve and MiGente, and during the 2008 campaign Barack Obama became the first presidential candidate with profiles on all three.
A. LiveJournal
B. BlackPlanet
C. Bebo
What is "BlackPlanet"?
In August 2026, midway through a landmark trial in Oakland, Meta agreed to a roughly $17 billion settlement with 47 states that makes this the default daily time limit on Instagram and Facebook for users under 18.
A. 30 minutes
B. 1 hour
C. 2 hours
What are "2 hours"?
Launched in 1997 and named for the idea that everyone is linked through a short chain of acquaintances, this site is considered by scholars danah boyd and Nicole Ellison to be the first recognizable social network site.
C. GeoCities
What is "SixDegrees.com"
A landmark 2018 study in the journal Science, which tracked about 126,000 stories shared on Twitter from 2006 to 2017, found that false news was this much more likely to be retweeted than the truth.
A. About 70% more likely
B. About twice as likely
C. About six times as likely
What is "about 70% more likely"?
Long before it meant a funny image passed around online, the word "meme" was coined in 1976 by this evolutionary biologist. In his book The Selfish Gene, he used it for units of culture, like tunes, catchphrases and fashions, that spread from person to person the way genes do.
A. Carl Sagan
B. Richard Dawkins
C. Stephen Jay Gould
Who is "Richard Dawkins"?