Alexis Madrigal, then an editor at The Atlantic, coined the term “dark social” in 2012 to describe the way we share articles and other links privately via messages and email. He estimated that 70 percent of referrals came not from the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, but from dark social. Snapchat has no links, so the entire rise of these little kingdoms has been through dark social, mimicking the way the app originally spread through high schools and colleges, being whispered about and texted person to person.
