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The timeline can be navigated with the “Scroll Left” and “Scroll Right” buttons or by dragging the pointer to a date on the timeline waveform (located at the bottom of the screen on the desktop version and on the left of the screen on mobile). To filter by a particular topic and see a smaller section of the data, make a selection on the dropdown “Filters” menu or click “Search” to do a keyword search. Hover over the abbreviated filter tags in the blue boxes to see the complete name of the filter, or click a filter to display all the data with this tag. If you want to take a deeper dive into a specific topic by viewing a narrative essay page and a curated timeline, click on “Stories.”

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PatientsLikeMe, a for-profit social media patient network, is founded.

2004

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PatientsLikeMe (PLM) allows patients to connect with each other to share experiences and track their conditions. In the process, they generate massive amounts of data that are then sold to partnering companies, including Walgreens, Novartis, Merck, Bristol Myers Squibb, and many other pharmaceutical corporations.

These companies buy the data and use it to fine-tune their development of pharmaceuticals. In fact, this is one of the ways that Viagra, which was originally a drug for hypertension, was discovered to increase erections.

PLM will be criticized as a significant player in the emergence of new forms of unpaid clinical labor, since the data provided through PLM is used to build profit for private companies. It has a significantly white patient user majority platform.