As of February 2025, it was found that men between the ages of 25 and 34 years made up Facebook's largest audience, accounting for 18.5 percent of global users. Additionally, Facebook's second-largest audience base could be found with men aged 18 to 24 years. Facebook connects the world Founded in 2004 and going public in 2012, Facebook is one of the biggest internet companies in the world with influence that goes beyond social media. It is widely considered as one of the Big Four tech companies, along with Google, Apple, and Amazon (all together known under the acronym GAFA). Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide and the company also owns three other billion-user properties: mobile messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, as well as photo-sharing app Instagram. Facebook usersThe vast majority of Facebook users connect to the social network via mobile devices. This is unsurprising, as Facebook has many users in mobile-first online markets. Currently, India ranks first in terms of Facebook audience size with 378 million users. The United States, Brazil, and Indonesia also all have more than 100 million Facebook users each.

Facebook probably needs no introduction; nonetheless, here is a quick history of the company. The world’s biggest and most-famous social network was launched by Mark Zuckerberg while he was a...

In the fourth quarter of 2023, Meta's Facebook had 408 million monthly active users (MAUs) in Europe. During the same quarter of 2022, the platform amassed around 407 million MAUs in Europe.

Monthly active users worldwide

In the fourth quarter of 2008 Facebook provided a service for just 100 million active users. Thirteen years on, as of the second quarter of 2021 that number had risen to an astounding 2.89 billion MAUs. The number of MAUs has never taken a backward step during the examined period.

 Growth outside of Europe and North America 

Facebook continues to focus on regions outside of Europe and North America, and the reward of this effort can be seen in areas such as the Asia Pacific region, where the company has seen significant gains in terms of growing the active user base. Facebook reached over 788 million daily active users (DAU) in the second quarter of 2021.

With roughly three billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2023, Facebook is the most used online social network worldwide. The platform surpassed two billion active users in the second quarter of 2017, taking just over 13 years to reach this milestone. In comparison, Meta-owned Instagram took 11.2 years, and Google’s YouTube took just over 14 years to achieve this landmark. As of January 2022, Facebook’s leading audience base was in India, with almost 330 million users whilst the United States ranked second with an approximate total of 179 million users. The platform also finds remarkable popularity in Indonesia and Brazil. Social Media usage in the United States In January 2021, Facebook was the platform on which users in the United States spent the most time per day. The average time spent on Facebook was 33 minutes, followed by TikTok with 32 minutes and Twitter with 31 daily minutes. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, all major social media platforms saw an increase in daily usage, which then either plateaued or decreased in 2021. At the end of 2021, over a quarter of all Facebook users in the United States belonged to the 25 to 34 year age group and 18.2 percent of users were in the 35 to 44 year age group. In general, Facebook users were more likely to be female. Meta Platforms Meta is Facebook’s recently renamed parent company and had a grand total of 3.59 billion core product users by the final quarter of 2021. Other Meta products include Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Oculus – Meta’s virtual reality subsidiary which produces VR headsets. In 2021, Meta's revenue amounted to 117 billion US dollars, up from around 86 billion U.S. dollars in the previous financial year.

This fileset contains a series of screenshots taken from our facebook advertising account. A few days ago we noticed that some negative "SEO" tactics, for lack of a better term, were having a negative impact on the performance of ads and fan engagement on the facebook page that we've been building.

I developed a custom software package, which utilizes nueural networks I've developed, to identify a target demographic, and suggest advertising content for said target demographic.

After a short training period we were able to create advertisemsents on facebook that averaged a cost of 0.01 cents per like. We also had a fan page engagement of nearly 4 times that of major brands like Wal-Mart.

Shortly after we began to obtain success we started noticing problems with our page. Since we have a stalker issue, we determined that the issues with our page were likely related to him.

We assued this because we had a disproportinately high number of spammy, negative, and inapporpriate comments on our posts. Offline harassment of our staff by the stalker also increased significantly during this time.

Curiously, we believe that the incident with the stalker allowed us to ascertain some interesting observations about Facebook's algorithims, which I've outlined below.

We believe, after reseraching this issue, that Facebook's algorithims suffer from the following issues:

1. They are easily gamed. We think that Facebook's algorithims are hypersensitive to negative comments being made on a post, and conversely likely positive ones as well. If a post is hidden, the comments are negative, or if a user interacts with the post negatively in some way, then Facebook's algorithims will "punish" your page.

2. We think that a series of scripted fake bot accounts would easily cause the issues that we've been expriencing.

As you can see from the data provided, over 90% of our likes come from paid facebook advertisement, therefore we do not have a significant number of fake accounts on our page brought in by third party advertising because we didn't do any of that.

Moreover, we did not send any of our fans obtained via mailing lists, or offline contact to our facebook page, those fans participate with us via email and/or through our private Google+ community.

So it is safe to say that our problems have not been caused by purchasing a large amount of fake likes from any third party vendor.

In addition, because our likes were gained very quickly, at a rate of about 2.5k likes a day, we do not believe that we have suffered from changes in the general demographic of our Facebook fan base over time.

Yet almost immediately after we started expericing trolling issues with our page, we also noticed a dip in the number of fans our posts were shown to by Facebook, and the performance of our ads began to go down, even though the content on our page had not changed.

We attributed this to holes in Facebook's algorithims, and potentially to the excessive use of fake bot accounts by Facebook itself.

We cannot prove the latter satement, but there have been similar reports before. Reference - http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/08/01/facebook-investigating-claims-that-80-of-ad-clicks-come-from-bots/

This article from Forbes outlines how one startup company repoted that up to 80% of their Facebook likes were fake bot accounts even though they paid for advertising directly through Facebook.

Our reserach suggests that Facebook's advertising platform functions as follows: - An advertiser pays for likes with Facebook, and the quality of the content on their page is initially assessed by those who are liking the page, but once the page obtains a following, we believe that the quality of the content is assessed by how many people like the posts on the page directly after they are posted.

If a post gets hidden, marked as spammed, skipped over, whatever, then we beleive that Facebook kicks that post out of the newsfeeds. If this happens to a significant number of posts on the page, then we believe that Facebook places the page on an advertising black-list.

Once on this black-list ads will begin to perform poorly, and content will drop out of newsfeeds causing even the most active page to go silent.

We tested this by posting pictures of attractive blond women, which with our demographic would have normally obtained a large number of likes and we struggled to get even 10 likes at over 20k page likes when we would have previosuly obtained almost 100 likes without boosting at only 5k page likes.

Why this probably isn't seen more often: In most cases this probably takes a while to occur as pages become old and fans grow bored, but in our case, because we have a stalker trolling our page with what appears to be hundres of scripted bot accounts, the effect was seen immediately.

Our data suggests that it became a tug of war between our stalker's army of fake bot accounts (making spammy comments, hiding our posts from newsfeeds, etc) and the real fans that actually like our page (who were voting our conent up - i.e. liking it, etc).

If you look at the graph of page likes in the figures provided - you can see that the darker purple are the fans we obtained via facebook advertising, well over 90%. We believe that the light purple (the "organic" fans) is mostly comprised of our stalker's fake drone accounts. We have less than 20 family members and friends liking our page, when we began this experiment we asked them not to interact with our page or the content.

In conclusion: We still have a lot more work to do, but it is highly likely that many Facebook likes are either scripted bots, and/or that Facebook's "weighting" algorithims are very suceptible to gaming via negative "SEO" tactics. Conversely, they are likely sensitive to gaming via positive "SEO" tactics as well.

Of course we cannot say for certain where the Facebook accounts that like a page come from without acess to their internal systems, but the evidence does strongly suggest that Facebook might be plagued with a large quantity of bot accounts, and that their algorithim has to be sensitive to actions from live users, so that the quality of the content can be easily ascertained. Otherwise it would be pretty easy for an advertiser to game Facebook's system by paying for, and getting, a large quantity of likes for content that is not appealing to any significant group of people.

Again we have to reiterate that we have no solid proof of this, but our data strongly suggests that this is the case.

We have reported the issues to Facebook, but interestingly, after we made it clear that we were going to analyze and investigate the issues with our page, we have been suddenly and incessently plagued with a never ending stream of "technical difficulties" related to our advertising account.

If you'd like to collaborate on this project, please feel free to email me at Jamie@ITSmoleculardesign.com.

This statistic provides information on the regional distribution of Facebook users in the Middle East and North Africa as of June 2012, based on regional user figures. As of that month, there were 10.73 million Facebook users in Egypt.

As of April 2024, it was found that men between the ages of 25 and 34 years made up Facebook largest audience, accounting for 18.4 percent of global users. Additionally, Facebook's second largest audience base could be found with men aged 18 to 24 years.

              Facebook connects the world

              Founded in 2004 and going public in 2012, Facebook is one of the biggest internet companies in the world with influence that goes beyond social media. It is widely considered as one of the Big Four tech companies, along with Google, Apple, and Amazon (all together known under the acronym GAFA). Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide and the company also owns three other billion-user properties: mobile messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger,
              as well as photo-sharing app Instagram. Facebook usersThe vast majority of Facebook users connect to the social network via mobile devices. This is unsurprising, as Facebook has many users in mobile-first online markets. Currently, India ranks first in terms of Facebook audience size with 378 million users. The United States, Brazil, and Indonesia also all have more than 100 million Facebook users each.

In the fourth quarter of 2023, about 308 million people in Europe used Meta's Facebook on a daily basis, up slightly from the previous quarter, yet with a year-over-year increase of around four million users. Overall, the number of DAU in Europe has remained relatively stable since the beginning of 2020.

UPDATED 08/12/2013: The editor of Indie Review Magazine, spoke with Facebook on 08/12/2013, and it was confirmed that the technical difficulities with the advertising account have been resolved.

They will be assisting in an investigation to handle the troll problem with the magazne's page, and the other difficulties the page has been experiencing as a direct result of the stalker's harassment.

Attached you will find screenshots of various ads that we've released on Facebook.

The conclusion: The software predicted a performance for all of the ads pictured of 0.01 - 0.03. Prior to having major issues with negative "SEO" tactics on our facebook page the software's predictions for advertising perforamnce was extremely accurate.

After we began experiencing the troll problem, the advertisements began to perform in a very unpredicatble, sporadic, and oftentimes schizophrenic fashion.

The same ad, with the swimsuit model, showed a sustained performance of 0.08 earlier in the day, and later in the evening, after a series of technial difficulties on Facebook's end (with our page) the perforamance of the ad shot down to 0.19.

We took video of the ads from the moment they began to run until we paused them after the money started to deplete at an alarming rate, and what we found was shocking.

In the first 30 minutes our page was growing at a rate of around 3 likes a second (which is what is expected for the predicted growth rate of the ad - 0.01 to 0.03). This rate of growth had been sustained for days in the past with a very similar ad.

Then suddenly the ad performance plunged to dismal numbers that do not accurately reflect the rate at which our likes were initially gained. Not on the specific day in question nor in the past (with the same or similar ad and page content).

At this time, we have paused all of our facebook ads and plan to thoroughly analyze this data.

As stated in a previous article, which is linked below, we cannot comment directly on the internal workings of Facebook's advertising platform as we do not have access to that system - but our data highly suggests that if someone is using bot accounts they can significantly impact page performance.

We have been relying heavily on our custom software pagacke to anaylze the sitaution, and with the help of my neural networks we were able to identify patterns which revealed problem areas and allowed us to adjust our advertising strategy so that our page would be less suspectible to negative SEO tactics.

UPDATE: 08/10/2013 Facebook will be speaking with the editor of Indie Review Magazine, they indicated that there were experiencing technical difficulties. These technical difficulties have been impacting our page for days, thus we've halted our experimentation and will update with another figshare article, once more information has been obtained.

Reference: 1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/08/01/facebook-investigating-claims-that-80-of-ad-clicks-come-from-bots/ 2. Previous figshare article: http://figshare.com/articles/Potential_Issues_with_FB_Advertising_Algorithms_/767331

India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: FB: Pulses and Products data was reported at 113.300 2012=100 in Oct 2018. This records a decrease from the previous number of 113.500 2012=100 for Sep 2018. India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: FB: Pulses and Products data is updated monthly, averaging 113.400 2012=100 from Jan 2011 (Median) to Oct 2018, with 94 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 191.600 2012=100 in Nov 2015 and a record low of 89.700 2012=100 in Jan 2011. India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: FB: Pulses and Products data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Central Statistics Office. The data is categorized under Global Database’s India – Table IN.IA005: Consumer Price Index: 2012=100: Urban.

India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: FB: Egg data was reported at 137.800 2012=100 in Nov 2018. This records an increase from the previous number of 133.500 2012=100 for Oct 2018. India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: FB: Egg data is updated monthly, averaging 119.500 2012=100 from Jan 2011 (Median) to Nov 2018, with 95 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 146.700 2012=100 in Nov 2017 and a record low of 82.300 2012=100 in May 2011. India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: FB: Egg data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Central Statistics Office. The data is categorized under Global Database’s India – Table IN.IA005: Consumer Price Index: 2012=100: Urban.

This statistic shows the number of Facebook users in Asia Pacific in 2012 and 2013 with projections until 2018. In 2016, the number of Facebook users in the region is expected to reach 408.3 million.

India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: Weights: FB: Egg data was reported at 0.360 % in Oct 2018. This stayed constant from the previous number of 0.360 % for Sep 2018. India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: Weights: FB: Egg data is updated monthly, averaging 0.360 % from Jan 2011 (Median) to Oct 2018, with 94 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 0.360 % in Oct 2018 and a record low of 0.360 % in Oct 2018. India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: Weights: FB: Egg data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Central Statistics Office. The data is categorized under Global Database’s India – Table IN.IA006: Consumer Price Index: 2012=100: Urban: Weights.

This statistic shows the number of Facebook users in the Middle East and Africa from 2012 to 2018. In 2016, the number of Facebook users in the Middle East and Africa is expected to reach 202.8 million, up from 105.4 million in 2012.

India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: Weights: FB: Prepared Meals, Snacks, Sweets data was reported at 5.540 % in Oct 2018. This stayed constant from the previous number of 5.540 % for Sep 2018. India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: Weights: FB: Prepared Meals, Snacks, Sweets data is updated monthly, averaging 5.540 % from Jan 2011 (Median) to Oct 2018, with 94 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 5.540 % in Oct 2018 and a record low of 5.540 % in Oct 2018. India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: Weights: FB: Prepared Meals, Snacks, Sweets data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Central Statistics Office. The data is categorized under Global Database’s India – Table IN.IA006: Consumer Price Index: 2012=100: Urban: Weights.

India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: FB: Sugar and Confectionery data was reported at 112.500 2012=100 in Nov 2018. This records a decrease from the previous number of 112.800 2012=100 for Oct 2018. India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: FB: Sugar and Confectionery data is updated monthly, averaging 101.400 2012=100 from Jan 2011 (Median) to Nov 2018, with 95 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 123.900 2012=100 in Nov 2017 and a record low of 85.300 2012=100 in Aug 2015. India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: FB: Sugar and Confectionery data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Central Statistics Office. The data is categorized under Global Database’s India – Table IN.IA005: Consumer Price Index: 2012=100: Urban.

India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: Weights: FB: Fruits data was reported at 2.900 % in Nov 2018. This stayed constant from the previous number of 2.900 % for Oct 2018. India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: Weights: FB: Fruits data is updated monthly, averaging 2.900 % from Jan 2011 (Median) to Nov 2018, with 95 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 2.900 % in Nov 2018 and a record low of 2.900 % in Nov 2018. India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: Weights: FB: Fruits data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Central Statistics Office. The data is categorized under Global Database’s India – Table IN.IA006: Consumer Price Index: 2012=100: Urban: Weights.

This statistic provides information on the regional distribution of Facebook users across the Middle East and North Africa as of June 2012. As of that month, 25 percent of Facebook users from that region were located in Egypt.

How much time do people spend on social media? As of 2025, the average daily social media usage of internet users worldwide amounted to 141 minutes per day, down from 143 minutes in the previous year. Currently, the country with the most time spent on social media per day is Brazil, with online users spending an average of 3 hours and 49 minutes on social media each day. In comparison, the daily time spent with social media in the U.S. was just 2 hours and 16 minutes. Global social media usageCurrently, the global social network penetration rate is 62.3 percent. Northern Europe had an 81.7 percent social media penetration rate, topping the ranking of global social media usage by region. Eastern and Middle Africa closed the ranking with 10.1 and 9.6 percent usage reach, respectively. People access social media for a variety of reasons. Users like to find funny or entertaining content and enjoy sharing photos and videos with friends, but mainly use social media to stay in touch with current events friends. Global impact of social mediaSocial media has a wide-reaching and significant impact on not only online activities but also offline behavior and life in general. During a global online user survey in February 2019, a significant share of respondents stated that social media had increased their access to information, ease of communication, and freedom of expression. On the flip side, respondents also felt that social media had worsened their personal privacy, increased a polarization in politics and heightened everyday distractions.

India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: Weights: FB: Cereals and Products data was reported at 6.590 % in Nov 2018. This stayed constant from the previous number of 6.590 % for Oct 2018. India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: Weights: FB: Cereals and Products data is updated monthly, averaging 6.590 % from Jan 2011 (Median) to Nov 2018, with 95 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 6.590 % in Nov 2018 and a record low of 6.590 % in Nov 2018. India Consumer Price Index (CPI): 2012=100: Urban: Weights: FB: Cereals and Products data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Central Statistics Office. The data is categorized under Global Database’s India – Table IN.IA006: Consumer Price Index: 2012=100: Urban: Weights.