ABSTRACT
The term social media refers to the group of internet-based platforms in which a user creates a public or semi-public profile which is then used to establish a diversity of relationships with other users. The platforms which fall under the umbrella label of social media have shown a high degree of transformation and evolution in terms of their internal structure and mode of operation as well as of the preferences of their users. The very limited number of fixed telephone lines which traditionally exist in Latin America were directly responsible for the restricted scope of internet access during the large part of the 1990s and 2000s. The steady increase of mobile devices has brought along with it a return to instant messenger applications and made WhatsApp one of the tools with the greatest increase in number of users.
