This data set belongs to:Valkenburg, P. M., Beyens, I., Pouwels, J. L., van Driel, I. I., & Keijsers, L. (2021). Social media use and adolescents' self-esteem: Heading for a person-specific media effects paradigm. Journal of Communication, 71(1), 56-78. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaa039More information about the study is available on the Open Science Framework (OSF), including the preregistration of the design and sampling plan (https://osf.io/327cx), the preregistration of the hypotheses and analysis plan (https://osf.io/peqa4), and all syntax files (https://osf.io/y3z7d).For more information, please contact the authors at p.m.valkenburg@uva.nl or info@project-awesome.nl.

As of April 2024, almost 32 percent of global Instagram audiences were aged between 18 and 24 years, and 30.6 percent of users were aged between 25 and 34 years. Overall, 16 percent of users belonged to the 35 to 44 year age group.

              Instagram users

              With roughly one billion monthly active users, Instagram belongs to the most popular social networks worldwide. The social photo sharing app is especially popular in India and in the United States, which have respectively 362.9 million and 169.7 million Instagram users each.

              Instagram features

              One of the most popular features of Instagram is Stories. Users can post photos and videos to their Stories stream and the content is live for others to view for 24 hours before it disappears. In January 2019, the company reported that there were 500 million daily active Instagram Stories users. Instagram Stories directly competes with Snapchat, another photo sharing app that initially became famous due to it’s “vanishing photos” feature.
              As of the second quarter of 2021, Snapchat had 293 million daily active users.

Internet use in the UK annual estimates by age, sex, disability, ethnic group, economic activity and geographical location, including confidence intervals.

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.

This data set belongs to:Valkenburg, P. M., Beyens, I., Pouwels, J. L., van Driel, I. I., & Keijsers, L. (2021).Social media browsing and adolescent well-being: Challenging the “Passive Social Media Use Hypothesis” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmab015The preregistration of the design and sampling plan of the study (https://osf.io/327cx) and the preregistration of the hypotheses and analysis plan (https://osf.io/eahrx/) are available on the Open Science Framework (OSF).For more information, please contact the authors at p.m.valkenburg@uva.nl or info@project-awesome.nl.

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.

Context

Worldwide Social Media User in 2021 (Quarterly)

Acknowledgements

Facebook: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ Twitter: https://investor.twitterinc.com/home/default.aspx Instagram: https://investor.fb.com/home/default.aspx

This data set belongs to:Pouwels, J. L., Valkenburg, P. M., Beyens, I., van Driel, I. I., & Keijsers, L. (2021). Social media use and friendship closeness in adolescents’ daily lives: An experience sampling study. Developmental Psychology, 57(2), 309-323. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0001148The preregistration of the design, sampling and analysis plan of the study, as well as all syntax files and online supplemental materials are available on the Open Science Framework (OSF) at https://osf.io/evsjd/.For more information, please contact the authors at j.l.pouwels@uva.nl or info@project-awesome.nl.

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.

The codebook, preregistration, syntaxes, and online supplemental materials can be found on the Open Science Framework (OSF) at https://osf.io/cszk7/.For more information, please contact the authors via t.siebers@uva.nl or info@project-awesome.nl.

High Frequency Indicator: The dataset contains year- and month-wise compiled data from the year 2021 to till date on the number of different types of grievances (complaints) received from the users by Twitter and the action taken by it. The data compiled is based on the monthly transparency reports published by Twitter in accordance with Rule 4(1)(d) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (IT Rules, 2021).

The types of grievances received by Twitter include illegal activities, IP-related infringements and other issues such as Abuse,Harassment, Child Sexual Exploitation, Defamation, Hateful Conduct, Impersonation, Misinformation, etc. The action taken by Twitter on the basis of these reports includes the number of URLs actioned

This data set belongs to:Valkenburg, P. M., Pouwels, J. L., Beyens, I., van Driel, I. I., & Keijsers, L. (2021). Adolescents’ social media experiences and their self-esteem: A person-specific susceptibility perspective.The preregistration of the design, sampling and analysis plan of the study, as well as all syntax files and online supplemental materials are available on the Open Science Framework (OSF) at https://osf.io/75k4x/.For more information, please contact the authors at p.m.valkenburg@uva.nl or info@project-awesome.nl.Note that the variable 'educational level' has not been included in the final dataset as we published an anonymized datafile. Please be aware that you will not be able to conduct the exploratory analyses with regard to educational level with the data provided on Figshare. Please contact the corresponding author to obtain the 'educational level' variable.

Survey data collected in Canada, 2019. n = 1539. Using, Age, Facebook use and meme understanding to determine differences between demographics in relation to Instagram use

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

Data produced in Impact-of-social-media-on-suicide-rates .

Acknowledgements:

WHO data export (https://apps.who.int/gho/athena/api/GHO/SDGSUICIDE.csv) was used bound by the following poilcy: https://www.who.int/about/who-we-are/publishing-policies/data-policy

Kaggle dataset regarding social media usage was used (https://www.kaggle.com/margarethamartinez/socialmedia2021) with additional acknowledgements of the original sources necessary:

Acknowledgements:

Facebook: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/

Twitter: https://investor.twitterinc.com/home/default.aspx

Instagram: https://investor.fb.com/home/default.aspx

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

High Frequency Indicator: The dataset contains year- and month-wise compiled data from the year 2021 to till date on the number of different types of grievances (complaints) received from the users of Facebook and Instagram by Meta and the action taken by it. The data compiled is based on the monthly transparency reports published by Meta in accordance with Rule 4(1)(d) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (IT Rules, 2021).

The types of grievances received by Meta, for Facebook and Instagram, include content showing sexual content, account hacked, lost of access, harassment, request access to personal data, etc. and the action taken include resolution by tools and special review

The dataset was gathering from Web of Science on the 13th of June 2022. Each record related three conditions simultaneously: i) “social media” or internet-based applications, ii) “general education” or keywords related to this level of study and not contain other grade-related keywords, iii) related to school activities. Data was limited regarding collections, research areas, types of documents, languages, and published years. Then, the document content was validated. Each record was reviewed based on its title and summary information, which determined the paper's eligibility. After the data collection process, the dataset containing 2,122 records related to SMGE for 2005-2021 was formed.

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.

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