The report provides a snapshot of the social media usage trends amongst online Canadian adults based on an online survey of 1500 participants. Canada continues to be one of the most connected countries in the world. An overwhelming majority of online Canadian adults (94%) have an account on at least one social media platform. However, the 2022 survey results show that the COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in some changes in how and where Canadians are spending their time on social media. Dominant platforms such as Facebook, messaging apps and YouTube are still on top but are losing ground to newer platforms such as TikTok and more niche platforms such as Reddit and Twitch.

The results might surprise you when looking at internet users that are active on social media in each country.

56.8% of the world’s total population is active on social media.

Instagram’s most popular post

              As of April 2024, the most popular post on Instagram was Lionel Messi and his teammates after winning the 2022 FIFA World Cup with Argentina, posted by the account @leomessi. Messi's post, which racked up over 61 million likes within a day, knocked off the reigning post, which was 'Photo of an Egg'. Originally posted in January 2021, 'Photo of an Egg' surpassed the world’s most popular Instagram post at that time, which was a photo by Kylie Jenner’s daughter totaling 18 million likes.
              After several cryptic posts published by the account, World Record Egg revealed itself to be a part of a mental health campaign aimed at the pressures of social media use.

              Instagram’s most popular accounts

              As of April 2024, the official Instagram account @instagram had the most followers of any account on the platform, with 672 million followers. Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo (@cristiano) was the most followed individual with 628 million followers, while Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) was the most followed woman on the platform with 429 million. Additionally, Inter Miami CF striker Lionel Messi (@leomessi) had a total of 502 million. Celebrities such as The Rock, Kylie Jenner, and Ariana Grande all had over 380 million followers each.

              Instagram influencers

              In the United States, the leading content category of Instagram influencers was lifestyle, with 15.25 percent of influencers creating lifestyle content in 2021. Music ranked in second place with 10.96 percent, followed by family with 8.24 percent. Having a large audience can be very lucrative: Instagram influencers in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom with over 90,000 followers made around 1,221 US dollars per post.

              Instagram around the globe

              Instagram’s worldwide popularity continues to grow, and India is the leading country in terms of number of users, with over 362.9 million users as of January 2024. The United States had 169.65 million Instagram users and Brazil had 134.6 million users. The social media platform was also very popular in Indonesia and Turkey, with 100.9 and 57.1, respectively. As of January 2024, Instagram was the fourth most popular social network in the world, behind Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp.

A dataset detailing the colleague connections within the Government of Canada’s social networking platform, GCconnex. The data has been anonymized, where each user on GCconnex is denoted by a random number. The dataset contains every user on GCconnex who has added a ‘colleague’ on the network, (colleague is synonymous with adding a friend on Facebook). When two users on GCconnex add each other as a colleague, a link is drawn between them, demonstrating their connection. This link is known in the data as an edge. Each user who has made a colleague on GCconnex is a node. The date the user created their account, and the department of each user is recorded for each node. The date a colleague connection was made is recorded with the edge. Comments

Gen Z and Millennials are the biggest social media users of all age groups.

Facebook and YouTube are still the most used social media platforms today.

In this post, I'll give you all the social media addiction statistics you need to be aware of to moderate your social media use.

Assessing possible risk before using social media platforms and apps

Dataset from our ICWSM 2017 paper. When using this resource, please use the following citation:

Aragón P., Gómez V., Kaltenbrunner A. (2017) To Thread or Not to Thread: The Impact of Conversation Threading on Online Discussion, ICWSM-17- 11th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Montreal, Canada.

@inproceedings {aragon2017ICWSM,
author = {Arag\'on, Pablo and G\'omez, Vicen\c{c} and Kaltenbrunner, Andreas},
title = {To Thread or Not to Thread: The Impact of Conversation Threading on Online Discussion},
booktitle = {ICWSM-17 - 11th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media},
publisher = {The AAAI Press},
location = {Montreal, Canada},
year = 2017
}

More info about this dataset can also be found at:

Aragón P., Gómez V., Kaltenbrunner A., (2017) Detecting Platform Effects in Online Discussions, Policy & Internet, 9, 2017.

@article{aragon2017PI,
author = {Arag\'on, Pablo and G\'omez, Vicen\c{c} and Kaltenbrunner, Andreas},
title = {Detecting Platform Effects in Online Discussions},
journal = {Policy & Internet},
volume = {9},
number = {4},
pages = {420-443},
doi = {10.1002/poi3.158},
url = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/poi3.158},
eprint = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/poi3.158},
year = {2017}
}

Crawling process

We built a crawling process that collects all the stories in the front page of Meneame from 2011 to 2015 (both years included). We then performed a second crawling process to collect every comment from the discussion thread of each story. From both crawling processes, we obtained 72,005 stories and 5,385,324 comments.

It is important to highlight two issues taken into account when the crawler was designed. First, the machine-readable robots.txt file on Meneame does not disallow this process. Second, the footnote of Meneame indicates the licenses of the code, graphics and content of the website. The license for content is Attribution 3.0 Spain (CC BY 3.0 ES) which allows us to release this dataset.

Fields

Every discussion thread is stored in a JSON file named with the URL slug of the corresponding story in Meneame, located in a yyyy-mm-dd folder. The JSON file is an array of elements with the following fields:

id (string): ID of the story/comment


sent (timestamp): Date of the story/comment as yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ssZ.


message (string): Text of the story/comment


user (string): Username of the authoring story/comment


karma (number): Karma score of the comment when the crawling was performed


comments_count (number): Number of comments in reply to the story/post


votes (number): Number of votes to the story/comment


thread (string): URL of the thread


thread_id (string): Sequential arriving order to the thread (0 if story, >=1 if comment)


depth (string): Depth within the thread (0 if story, >=1 if comment)


url (string): URL of the specific story/comment







title (string): Title, only available for stories.


published (string): Date when published on the front page, only available for stories.


tags (string): Tags, only available for stories.


clics (string): Number of clicks, only available for stories.


users (string): Number of user votes, only available for stories.


anonymous (string): Number of anonymous votes, only available for stories.


negatives (string): Number of negative votes, only available for stories.







in_reply_to_id (string): ID of the parent story/comment, only available for comments.


in_reply_to_user (string): Authoring user of the parent story/comment, only available for comments.


in_reply_to_thread_id (string): Sequential arriving order to the thread of of the parent story/comment, only available for comments.

Acknowledgment

This work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the María de Maeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015-0502).

The results of which gender uses which platforms are in.

This dataset is the result of two surveys, conducted in August and November 2018. Departments and Agencies were asked to indicate whether they were compliant with the Direction on Enabling Access to Web Services. This Policy Implementation Notice instructs departments to enable access to web services on GC electronic networks for unclassified information. The dataset contains a list of departments and their self-assessed compliance with the Direction. The dataset also includes information on the availability of specific social media and productivity websites within each department. This list is a set of examples based on popular service providers; all websites that do not present a security or other risk are open by default, according to the Direction. Site restrictions are determined by the Policy on Acceptable Network and Device Usage

Regional use of social media has a significant effect on the male and female social media statistics.

The average person has 8-9 social media accounts. This has doubled since 2013, when the average person just had 4-5 accounts.

Briefing package for the Privacy Commissioner of Canada as witness before the Standing Committee on ETHI on October 25. 2023 On the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s 2022-23 Annual Report to Parliament and the Committee’s study on the use of social media platforms for data harvesting and unethical or illicit sharing of personal information with foreign entities

Over 210 million people worldwide suffer from social media addiction.

90% of people aged 18-29 use social media in some form. 15% of people aged 23-38 admit that they are addicted to social media.

Presentation to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, April 29, 2010.

Today the average time spent on social media is 2 hours and 24 minutes today for people aged 16 to 64.

Teenagers are the 2nd largest group of people affected by social media addiction. Teens ages 13 to 18 years old spend a significant amount of their free time on social media with an average of 3 hours a day.