Cristiano Ronaldo has one of the most popular Instagram accounts as of April 2024.

              The Portuguese footballer is the most-followed person on the photo sharing app platform with 628 million followers. Instagram's own account was ranked first with roughly 672 million followers.

              How popular is Instagram?

              Instagram is a photo-sharing social networking service that enables users to take pictures and edit them with filters. The platform allows users to post and share their images online and directly with their friends and followers on the social network. The cross-platform app reached one billion monthly active users in mid-2018. In 2020, there were over 114 million Instagram users in the United States and experts project this figure to surpass 127 million users in 2023.

              Who uses Instagram?

              Instagram audiences are predominantly young – recent data states that almost 60 percent of U.S. Instagram users are aged 34 years or younger. Fall 2020 data reveals that Instagram is also one of the most popular social media for teens and one of the social networks with the biggest reach among teens in the United States.

              Celebrity influencers on Instagram
              Many celebrities and athletes are brand spokespeople and generate additional income with social media advertising and sponsored content. Unsurprisingly, Ronaldo ranked first again, as the average media value of one of his Instagram posts was 985,441 U.S. dollars.

This dataset is structured as a graph, where nodes represent users and edges capture their interactions, including tweets, retweets, replies, and mentions. Each node provides detailed user attributes, such as unique ID, follower and following counts, and verification status, offering insights into each user's identity, role, and influence in the mental health discourse. The edges illustrate user interactions, highlighting engagement patterns and types of content that drive responses, such as tweet impressions. This interconnected structure enables sentiment analysis and public reaction studies, allowing researchers to explore engagement trends and identify the mental health topics that resonate most with users.

The dataset consists of three files: 1. Edges Data: Contains graph data essential for social network analysis, including fields for UserID (Source), UserID (Destination), Post/Tweet ID, and Date of Relationship. This file enables analysis of user connections without including tweet content, maintaining compliance with Twitter/X’s data-sharing policies. 2. Nodes Data: Offers user-specific details relevant to network analysis, including UserID, Account Creation Date, Follower and Following counts, Verified Status, and Date Joined Twitter. This file allows researchers to examine user behavior (e.g., identifying influential users or spam-like accounts) without direct reference to tweet content. 3. Twitter/X Content Data: This file contains only the raw tweet text as a single-column dataset, without associated user identifiers or metadata. By isolating the text, we ensure alignment with anonymization standards observed in similar published datasets, safeguarding user privacy in compliance with Twitter/X's data guidelines. This content is crucial for addressing the research focus on mental health discourse in social media. (References to prior Data in Brief publications involving Twitter/X data informed the dataset's structure.)

As of April 2024, around 16.5 percent of global active Instagram users were men between the ages of 18 and 24 years. More than half of the global Instagram population worldwide was aged 34 years or younger.

              Teens and social media

              As one of the biggest social networks worldwide, Instagram is especially popular with teenagers. As of fall 2020, the photo-sharing app ranked third in terms of preferred social network among teenagers in the United States, second to Snapchat and TikTok. Instagram was one of the most influential advertising channels among female Gen Z users when making purchasing decisions. Teens report feeling more confident, popular, and better about themselves when using social media, and less lonely, depressed and anxious.
              Social media can have negative effects on teens, which is also much more pronounced on those with low emotional well-being. It was found that 35 percent of teenagers with low social-emotional well-being reported to have experienced cyber bullying when using social media, while in comparison only five percent of teenagers with high social-emotional well-being stated the same. As such, social media can have a big impact on already fragile states of mind.

More than 100 social media channels and statistics for the National Archives and Records Administration.

According to a 2023 survey of adults in the United States, most respondents expressed concern regarding social media companies data collection practices. About ** percent of respondents were very concerned about how social media platforms collect their personal data, while ** percent were somewhat concerned. In contrast, only ** percent of respondents were not very concerned, and a mere **** percent of respondents were not at all concerned about their personal data being collected by these companies.

Facebook is fast approaching 3 billion monthly active users. That’s about 36% of the world’s entire population that log in and use Facebook at least once a month.

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

The average Twitter user spends 5.1 hours per month on the platform.

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

One of the sectors that felt the impact of the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic was the educational sector. The outbreak led to the immediate closure of schools at all levels thereby sending billions of students away from their various institutions of learning. However, the shut down of academic institutions was not a total one as some institutions that were solely running online programmes were not affected. Those who were running face to face and online modes quickly switched over to the online mode. Unfortunately, institutions that have not fully embraced online mode of study were greatly affected. 85% of academic institutions in Nigeria are operating face to face mode of study, therefore, majority of Nigerian students at all levels were affected by the COVID-19 lockdown. Social media platforms and emerging technologies were the major backbones of institutions that are running online mode of study, therefore, this survey uses the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model to capture selected Face to face Nigerian University students accessibility, usage, intention and willingness to use these social media platforms and emerging technologies for learning. The challenges that could mar the usage of these technologies were also revealed. Eight hundred and fifty undergraduate students participated in the survey.

The dataset includes the questionnaire used to retrieve the data, the responses obtained in spreadsheet format, the charts generated from the responses received, the Statistical Package of the Social Sciences (SPSS) file and the descriptive statistics for all the variables captured. This second version contains the reliability statistics of the UTAUT variables using Cronbach's alpha. This measured the reliability as well as the internal consistency of the UTAUT variables. This was measured in terms of the reliability statistics, inter-item correlation matrix and item-total statistics. Authors believed that the dataset will enhance understanding of how face to face students use social media platforms and how these platforms could be used to engage the students outside their classroom activities. Also, the dataset exposes how familiar face to face University students are to these emerging teaching and learning technologies.

As of January 2024, #love was the most used hashtag on Instagram, being included in over two billion posts on the social media platform. #Instagood and #instagram were used over one billion times as of early 2024.

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

MuMiN is a misinformation graph dataset containing rich social media data (tweets, replies, users, images, articles, hashtags), spanning 21 million tweets belonging to 26 thousand Twitter threads, each of which have been semantically linked to 13 thousand fact-checked claims across dozens of topics, events and domains, in 41 different languages, spanning more than a decade.

MuMiN fills a gap in the existing misinformation datasets in multiple ways:

By having a large amount of social media information which have been semantically linked to fact-checked claims on an individual basis. By featuring 41 languages, enabling evaluation of multilingual misinformation detection models. By featuring both tweets, articles, images, social connections and hashtags, enabling multimodal approaches to misinformation detection.

MuMiN features two node classification tasks, related to the veracity of a claim:

Claim classification: Determine the veracity of a claim, given its social network context. Tweet classification: Determine the likelihood that a social media post to be fact-checked is discussing a misleading claim, given its social network context.

To use the dataset, see the "Getting Started" guide and tutorial at the MuMiN website.

As of January 2024, Instagram was slightly more popular with men than women, with men accounting for 50.6 percent of the platform’s global users. Additionally, the social media app was most popular amongst younger audiences, with almost 32 percent of users aged between 18 and 24 years.

              Instagram’s Global Audience

              As of January 2024, Instagram was the fourth most popular social media platform globally, reaching two billion monthly active users (MAU). This number is projected to keep growing with no signs of slowing down, which is not a surprise as the global online social penetration rate across all regions is constantly increasing.
              As of January 2024, the country with the largest Instagram audience was India with 362.9 million users, followed by the United States with 169.7 million users.

              Who is winning over the generations?

              Even though Instagram’s audience is almost twice the size of TikTok’s on a global scale, TikTok has shown itself to be a fierce competitor, particularly amongst younger audiences. TikTok was the most downloaded mobile app globally in 2022, generating 672 million downloads. As of 2022, Generation Z in the United States spent more time on TikTok than on Instagram monthly.

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.

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

Annual data on internet usage in Great Britain, including frequency of internet use, internet activities and internet purchasing.

Austria - Individuals using the internet for participating in social networks was 64.74% in December of 2024, according to the EUROSTAT. Trading Economics provides the current actual value, an historical data chart and related indicators for Austria - Individuals using the internet for participating in social networks - last updated from the EUROSTAT on July of 2025. Historically, Austria - Individuals using the internet for participating in social networks reached a record high of 64.74% in December of 2024 and a record low of 35.28% in December of 2011.

Canadian Internet use survey, Internet use, by location of use, household income quartile and age group for Canada and regions, from 2010 and 2012.

Bluesky Social Dataset Pollution of online social spaces caused by rampaging d/misinformation is a growing societal concern. However, recent decisions to reduce access to social media APIs are causing a shortage of publicly available, recent, social media data, thus hindering the advancement of computational social science as a whole. To address this pressing issue, we present a large, high-coverage dataset of social interactions and user-generated content from Bluesky Social.

The dataset contains the complete post history of over 4M users (81% of all registered accounts), totaling 235M posts. We also make available social data covering follow, comment, repost, and quote interactions.

Since Bluesky allows users to create and bookmark feed generators (i.e., content recommendation algorithms), we also release the full output of several popular algorithms available on the platform, along with their timestamped “like” interactions and time of bookmarking.

This dataset allows unprecedented analysis of online behavior and human-machine engagement patterns. Notably, it provides ground-truth data for studying the effects of content exposure and self-selection, and performing content virality and diffusion analysis.

Dataset Here is a description of the dataset files.

followers.csv.gz. This compressed file contains the anonymized follower edge list. Once decompressed, each row consists of two comma-separated integers u, v, representing a directed following relation (i.e., user u follows user v). posts.tar.gz. This compressed folder contains data on the individual posts collected. Decompressing this file results in 100 files, each containing the full posts of up to 50,000 users. Each post is stored as a JSON-formatted line. interactions.csv.gz. This compressed file contains the anonymized interactions edge list. Once decompressed, each row consists of six comma-separated integers, and represents a comment, repost, or quote interaction. These integers correspond to the following fields, in this order: user_id, replied_author, thread_root_author, reposted_author ,quoted_author, and date. graphs.tar.gz. This compressed folder contains edge list files for the graphs emerging from reposts, quotes, and replies. Each interaction is timestamped. The folder also contains timestamped higher-order interactions emerging from discussion threads, each containing all users participating in a thread. feed_posts.tar.gz. This compressed folder contains posts that appear in 11 thematic feeds. Decompressing this folder results in 11 files containing posts from one feed each. Posts are stored as a JSON-formatted line. Fields are correspond to those in posts.tar.gz, except for those related to sentiment analysis (sent_label, sent_score), and reposts (repost_from, reposted_author); feed_bookmarks.csv. This file contains users who bookmarked any of the collected feeds. Each record contains three comma-separated values, namely the feed name, the user id, and the timestamp. feed_post_likes.tar.gz. This compressed folder contains data on likes to posts appearing in the feeds, one file per feed. Each record in the files contains the following information, in this order: the id of the ``liker'', the id of the post's author, the id of the liked post, and the like timestamp; scripts.tar.gz. A collection of Python scripts, including the ones originally used to crawl the data, and to perform experiments. These scripts are detailed in a document released within the folder.

Citation If used for research purposes, please cite the following paper describing the dataset details:

Andrea Failla and Giulio Rossetti. "I'm in the Bluesky Tonight": Insights from a Year Worth of Social Data. (2024) arXiv:2404.18984

Acknowledgments: This work is supported by :

the European Union – Horizon 2020 Program under the scheme “INFRAIA-01-2018-2019 – Integrating Activities for Advanced Communities”, Grant Agreement n.871042, “SoBigData++: European Integrated Infrastructure for Social Mining and Big Data Analytics” (http://www.sobigdata.eu); SoBigData.it which receives funding from the European Union – NextGenerationEU – National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza, PNRR) – Project: “SoBigData.it – Strengthening the Italian RI for Social Mining and Big Data Analytics” – Prot. IR0000013 – Avviso n. 3264 del 28/12/2021; EU NextGenerationEU programme under the funding schemes PNRR-PE-AI FAIR (Future Artificial Intelligence Research).