A survey conducted in December 2020 assessing if news consumers in the United States had ever unknowingly shared fake news or information on social media found that 38.2 percent had done so. A similar share had not, whereas seven percent were unsure if they had accidentally disseminated misinformation on social networks.

Fake news in the U.S.

Fake news, or news that contains misinformation, has become a prevalent issue within the American media landscape. Fake news can be circulated online as news stories with deliberately misleading headings, or clickbait, but the rise of misinformation cannot be solely accredited to online social media. Forms of fake news are also found in print media, with 47 percent of Americans witnessing fake news in newspapers and magazines as of January 2019.

News consumers in the United States are aware of the spread of misinformation, with many Americans believing online news websites regularly report fake news stories. With such a high volume of online news websites publishing false information, it can be difficult to assess the credibility of a story. This can have damaging effects on society in that the public struggled to keep informed, creating a great deal of confusion about even basic facts and contributing to incivility.

Dark social refers to web traffic from internet users who share content with each other instead of sharing it publicly. Based a February 2019 survey, 63 percent of internet users from the United States and the UK stated that they were likely to share content and information to their peers through private messaging apps.

A line chart that shows % of U.S. adults who say they ever use …

When it came to online data sharing, German internet users presented the highest awareness among other European countries of how much personal data they were giving away. As of 2023, approximately ** percent of German internet users reported they were aware of the amount of personal information they shared on the internet and social networks. Users in France followed, with ** percent of users reporting they were aware of the amount of data they shared. In comparison, less than ** percent of users in Italy reported the same level of awareness.

A line chart that shows % of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 who say they ever use the following apps or sites

A 2022 survey of consumers in the United Kingdom found that 45 percent of respondents were unwilling to share financial information, such as income details, with online companies they were dealing with for the first time. A further 37 percent said they were not eager to share health and location information. Other personal details, such as name, demographic information, and contact information, came more easy to share for consumers, with around 60 percent respondents reporting to be somewhat willing to share personal information. About five in 10 respondents said they would share information about their gender online.

A stacked-bar chart that shows % of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 who say they visit or use the following apps or sites …

According to a survey conducted between August and September 2024, **** percent of content creators fact-check the source of information before sharing it with their audience. In contrast, **** percent of respondents shared the content they found entertaining or useful without checking for accuracy.

A line chart that shows % of U.S. adults who say they use the internet

This statistic presents the distribution of the top 100 stories on Facebook worldwide as of March 2019, by genre. In the measured period, stories related to politics accounted for 36 percent of interactions among the top 100 Facebook stories.

This statistic presents the frequency of social media platform feature usage in the United States as of February 2018. According to the results, 47 percent of surveyed internet users in the United States stated that they preferred to use Facebook for news feed feature, while in comparison only six percent stated similar preferences in use for Instagram.

A line chart that shows % of U.S. adults who say they use the internet, by annual household income

A line chart that shows % of U.S. adults who say they use the internet, by race and ethnicity

A line chart that shows % of U.S. adults who say they get news from ...

This statistic presents the share of reasons that Facebook users in the United States are sharing less content with friends and followers on social media as of April 2018. According to the findings, 47 percent of surveyed Facebook users reported that the main reason as to why they were sharing less content with friends and followers on the social media platform was due to their privacy concerns revolving around Facebook itself.

The Internet’s history has just begun

The Internet’s history goes back some decades by now – email has been around since the 1960s, file sharing since at least the 1970s, and TCP/IP was standardized in 1982. But it was the creation of the world wide web in 1989 that revolutionized our history of communication. The inventor of the world wide web was the English scientist Tim Berners-Lee who created a system to share information through a network of computers. At the time he was working for the European physics laboratory CERN in the Swiss Alps.

Here I want to look at the global expansion of the Internet since then.

This chart shows the share and number of people that are using the Internet, which in these statistics refers to all those who have used the Internet in the last 3 months.1

The chart starts in 1990, still, one year before Berners-Lee released the first web browser and before the very first website was online (the site of CERN, which is still online). At that time very few computers around the world were connected to a network; estimates for 1990 suggest that only half of a per cent of the world population were online.

As the chart shows, this started to change in the 1990s, at least in some parts of the world: By the year 2000 almost half of the population in the US was accessing information through the internet. But across most of the world, the internet had not yet had much influence – 93% in the East Asia and Pacific region and 99% in South Asia and in Sub-Saharan Africa were still offline in 2000. At the time of the Dot-com-crash, less than 7% of the world was online.

15 years later, in 2016, three-quarters (76%) of people in the US were online and during these years countries from many parts of the world caught up: in Malaysia, 79% used the internet; in Spain and Singapore 81%; in France 86%; in South Korea and Japan 93%; in Denmark and Norway 97%; and Iceland tops the ranking with 98% of the population online.2

At the other end of the spectrum, there are still countries where almost nothing has changed since 1990. In the very poorest countries – including Eritrea, Somalia, Guinea-Bissau, the Central African Republic, Niger, and Madagascar – fewer than 5% are online. And at the very bottom is North Korea, where the country’s oppressive regime restricts access to the walled-off North Korean intranet Kwangmyong and access to the global internet is only granted to a very small elite.

But the overarching trend globally – and, as the chart shows, in all world regions – is clear: more and more people are online every year. The speed with which the world is changing is incredibly fast. On any day in the last 5 years, there were on average 640,000 people online for the first time.3

This was 27,000 every hour.

For those who are online most days, it is easy to forget how young the internet still is. The timeline below the chart reminds you how recent websites and technologies became available that are integrated into the everyday lives of millions: In the 1990s there was no Wikipedia, Twitter launched in 2006, and Our World in Data is only 4 years old (and look how many people have joined since then4).

And while many of us cannot imagine our lives without the services that the internet provides, the key message for me from this overview of the global history of the internet is that we are still in the very early stages of the internet. It was only in 2017 that half of the world population was online, and in 2018 it is therefore still the case that close to half of the world population is not using the internet.5

The internet has already changed the world, but the big changes that the Internet will bring still lie ahead and its history has just begun.

Content

The data consists of the Internet and the Evolution of Broadband around the world.

Acknowledgements

The Data is collected from Our World In Data

Inspiration

What share of people is online? How many internet users does each country have?

This statistic presents the percentage of adults in the United States who have shared an opinion piece they agreed with on social media as of November 2018, by gender. During the reported period, 48 percent of female respondents stated that they have shared an opinion piece they agreed with on social media.

This statistic presents the percentage of adults in the United States who have shared an opinion piece they agreed with on social media as of November 2018, by age. During the reported period, 60 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 to 29 years stated that they have shared an opinion piece they agreed with on social media.

This statistic presents the most popular video content categories on YouTube worldwide, ranked by market share. As of December 2018, people and blogs were the most popular YouTube content category based on share of available videos. The category accounted for 32 percent of public videos on the platform.

In January 2019, photo sharing platform Instagram reported 500 million daily active Stories users worldwide, up from 400 million global DAU in June 2018. Stories is a feature of the app allowing users post photo and video sequences that disappear 24 hours after being posted. Instagram usage Instagram has over one billion monthly active users and is one of the most popular social networks worldwide. The app allows users to edit and share photos with other users, either publicly or with pre-approved followers. In 2018, the number of Instagram users in the United States was almost 105 million users, with U.S. Instagram audiences set to grow to 131 million users by 2022. As of April 2019, it was found that the United States, Brazil and India had the largest Instagram audiences with the United States heading the ranking by a wide margin. Users between the ages of 25 and 34 years constituted the biggest demographic group, followed by users aged 18 to 24 years. Overall, over two thirds of global Instagram audiences were aged 34 and younger. Advertising and marketing on Instagram Due to the visual nature of the platform, Instagram is a perfect opportunity for brands and retailers to display their products in a flattering way. Many celebrities and influencers generate a sizable income by posting ads in the form of sponsored posts on Instagram. In 2018, there were approximately 3.7 million sponsored influencer posts on the platform. The most popular content type of Instagram posts by influencers worldwide were photos – videos accounted for just 13.56 percent of influencer posts.