A Truth Social data set containing a network of users, their associated posts, and additional information about each post. Collected from February 2022 through September 2022, this dataset contains 454,458 user entries and 845,060 Truth (Truth Social’s term for post) entries.

Comprised of 12 different files, the entry count for each file is shown below.

A readme file is provided that describes the structure of the files, necessary terms, and necessary information about the data collection.

How many people use social media?

              Social media usage is one of the most popular online activities. In 2024, over five billion people were using social media worldwide, a number projected to increase to over six billion in 2028.

              Who uses social media?
              Social networking is one of the most popular digital activities worldwide and it is no surprise that social networking penetration across all regions is constantly increasing. As of January 2023, the global social media usage rate stood at 59 percent. This figure is anticipated to grow as lesser developed digital markets catch up with other regions
              when it comes to infrastructure development and the availability of cheap mobile devices. In fact, most of social media’s global growth is driven by the increasing usage of mobile devices. Mobile-first market Eastern Asia topped the global ranking of mobile social networking penetration, followed by established digital powerhouses such as the Americas and Northern Europe.

              How much time do people spend on social media?
              Social media is an integral part of daily internet usage. On average, internet users spend 151 minutes per day on social media and messaging apps, an increase of 40 minutes since 2015. On average, internet users in Latin America had the highest average time spent per day on social media.

              What are the most popular social media platforms?
              Market leader Facebook was the first social network to surpass one billion registered accounts and currently boasts approximately 2.9 billion monthly active users, making it the most popular social network worldwide. In June 2023, the top social media apps in the Apple App Store included mobile messaging apps WhatsApp and Telegram Messenger, as well as the ever-popular app version of Facebook.

Source

This folder contains network data for relationships between President Donald Trump and other people, which was originally compiled by John Templon, Anthony Cormier, Alex Campbell, and Jeremy Singer-Vine as part of a larger project of mapping "TrumpWorld" for BuzzFeed News.

The full dataset, which you can access as a Google Sheet or on GitHub also includes information about organizations and agencies. The data was compiled by culling from "public records, news reports, and other sources on the Trump family, his Cabinet picks, and top advisers," as well as via crowdsourced tips and information from the public (if you have any more, you can contribute them here).

Data & Methodology

Nodes: 303; unimodal

Edges: 366; unweighted; undirected

The nodes csv contains 303 different people, and the edges csv contains 366 unweighted relationships between those people, such as friendship, business partner, donor, parent/child, cabinet member, spouse, and more. This information about the relationships, along with the sources from which they were identified, is included as a column (and potential attribute) in the edges csv.

As stated above, the data was compiled by culling from "public records, news reports, and other sources on the Trump family, his Cabinet picks, and top advisers," as well as via crowdsourced tips.

*In order to make this data more accessible for basic social network analysis, I have condensed the network to only the top 303 most connected people in TrumpWorld.

Background & Significance

The relationships between President Donald Trump and other people lend themselves well to basic social network analysis because, as Templon, Cormier, Campbell, and Singer-Vine suggest, "No American president has taken office with a giant network of businesses, investments, and corporate connections like that amassed by Donald J. Trump."

Further, the social network analysis of some of the most powerful people in the nation and the world might help contribute to what Lauren Klein called for at the end of her 2018 MLA talk "Distant Reading After Moretti"--that is, computational analysis "trained on power."

Acknowlegement

Foto von Marco Zuppone auf Unsplash

Truth Social Dataset (Limited Version)

License: CC BY 4.0

  Overview

This dataset contains posts and comments scraped from Truth Social, focusing on Donald Trump’s posts (“Truths” and “Retruths”).Due to the initial collection method, all media and URLs were excluded. Future versions will include complete post data, including images and links. Contains 31.8Million Comments, and over 18000 Posts all By Trump. As well as logged over 1.5Million unique users who commented on… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/notmooodoo9/TrumpsTruthSocialPosts.

The global number of Facebook users was forecast to continuously increase between 2023 and 2027 by in total 391 million users (+14.36 percent). After the fourth consecutive increasing year, the Facebook user base is estimated to reach 3.1 billion users and therefore a new peak in 2027. Notably, the number of Facebook users was continuously increasing over the past years. User figures, shown here regarding the platform Facebook, have been estimated by taking into account company filings or press material, secondary research, app downloads and traffic data. They refer to the average monthly active users over the period and count multiple accounts by persons only once.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to 150 countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).

How much time do people spend on social media?

              As of 2024, the average daily social media usage of internet users worldwide amounted to 143 minutes per day, down from 151 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 three hours and 49 minutes on social media each day. In comparison, the daily time spent with social media in
              the U.S. was just two 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.

This dataset contains the predicted prices of the asset Truth Social over the next 16 years. This data is calculated initially using a default 5 percent annual growth rate, and after page load, it features a sliding scale component where the user can then further adjust the growth rate to their own positive or negative projections. The maximum positive adjustable growth rate is 100 percent, and the minimum adjustable growth rate is -100 percent.

As of February 2025, it was found that around 14.1 percent of TikTok's global audience were women between the ages of 18 and 24 years, while male users of the same age formed approximately 16.6 percent of the platform's audience. The online audience of the popular social video platform was further composed of 14.6 percent of female users aged between 25 and 34 years, and 20.7 percent of male users in the same age group.

This dataset is crawled from three popular on-line social networks (OSNs), namely, Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. We collected this dataset as follows. We first gathered a set of Singapore-based Twitter users who declared Singapore as location in their user profiles. From the Singapore-based Twitter users, we retrieve a subset of Twitter users who declared their Facebook or Foursquare accounts in their short bio description. In total, we collected 1,998 Twitter-Facebook user identity pairs (known as TW-FB ground truth matching pairs}, and 3,602 Twitter-Foursquare user identity pairs (known as TW-FQ ground truth matching pairs). To simulate a real-world setting, where a user identity in the source OSN may not have its corresponding matching user identity in the target OSN, we expanded the datasets by adding Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare users who are connected to users in the TW-FB ground truth matching pairs and TW-FQ ground truth matching pairs sets. Note that isolated users who do not have links to other users are removed from the data sets. After collecting the datasets, we extract the following user features using the OSNs' APIs. • Username: The username of the account. • Screen name: The natural name of the user account. It is usually formed using the first and last name of the user. • Profile Image: The thumbnail or image provided by the user to visually present herself. • Network: The relationship links between users.

General Description

This dataset comprises 4,038 tweets in Spanish, related to discussions about artificial intelligence (AI), and was created and utilized in the publication "Enhancing Sentiment Analysis on Social Media: Integrating Text and Metadata for Refined Insights," (10.1109/IE61493.2024.10599899) presented at the 20th International Conference on Intelligent Environments. It is designed to support research on public perception, sentiment, and engagement with AI topics on social media from a Spanish-speaking perspective. Each entry includes detailed annotations covering sentiment analysis, user engagement metrics, and user profile characteristics, among others.

Data Collection Method

Tweets were gathered through the Twitter API v1.1 by targeting keywords and hashtags associated with artificial intelligence, focusing specifically on content in Spanish. The dataset captures a wide array of discussions, offering a holistic view of the Spanish-speaking public's sentiment towards AI.

Dataset Content

ID: A unique identifier for each tweet.

text: The textual content of the tweet. It is a string with a maximum allowed length of 280 characters.

polarity: The tweet's sentiment polarity (e.g., Positive, Negative, Neutral).

favorite_count: Indicates how many times the tweet has been liked by Twitter users. It is a non-negative integer.

retweet_count: The number of times this tweet has been retweeted. It is a non-negative integer.

user_verified: When true, indicates that the user has a verified account, which helps the public recognize the authenticity of accounts of public interest. It is a boolean data type with two allowed values: True or False.

user_default_profile: When true, indicates that the user has not altered the theme or background of their user profile. It is a boolean data type with two allowed values: True or False.

user_has_extended_profile: When true, indicates that the user has an extended profile. An extended profile on Twitter allows users to provide more detailed information about themselves, such as an extended biography, a header image, details about their location, website, and other additional data. It is a boolean data type with two allowed values: True or False.

user_followers_count: The current number of followers the account has. It is a non-negative integer.

user_friends_count: The number of users that the account is following. It is a non-negative integer.

user_favourites_count: The number of tweets this user has liked since the account was created. It is a non-negative integer.

user_statuses_count: The number of tweets (including retweets) posted by the user. It is a non-negative integer.

user_protected: When true, indicates that this user has chosen to protect their tweets, meaning their tweets are not publicly visible without their permission. It is a boolean data type with two allowed values: True or False.

user_is_translator: When true, indicates that the user posting the tweet is a verified translator on Twitter. This means they have been recognized and validated by the platform as translators of content in different languages. It is a boolean data type with two allowed values: True or False.

Cite as

Guerrero-Contreras, G., Balderas-Díaz, S., Serrano-Fernández, A., & Muñoz, A. (2024, June). Enhancing Sentiment Analysis on Social Media: Integrating Text and Metadata for Refined Insights. In 2024 International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE) (pp. 62-69). IEEE.

Potential Use Cases

This dataset is aimed at academic researchers and practitioners with interests in:

Sentiment analysis and natural language processing (NLP) with a focus on AI discussions in the Spanish language.

Social media analysis on public engagement and perception of artificial intelligence among Spanish speakers.

Exploring correlations between user engagement metrics and sentiment in discussions about AI.

Data Format and File Type

The dataset is provided in CSV format, ensuring compatibility with a wide range of data analysis tools and programming environments.

License

The dataset is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, permitting sharing, copying, distribution, transmission, and adaptation of the work for any purpose, including commercial, provided proper attribution is given.

Which county has the most Facebook users?

              There are more than 378 million Facebook users in India alone, making it the leading country in terms of Facebook audience size. To put this into context, if India’s Facebook audience were a country then it would be ranked third in terms of largest population worldwide. Apart from India, there are several other markets with more than 100 million Facebook users each: The United States, Indonesia, and Brazil with 193.8 million, 119.05 million, and 112.55 million Facebook users respectively.

              Facebook – the most used social media

              Meta, the company that was previously called Facebook, owns four of the most popular social media platforms worldwide, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram. As of the third quarter of 2021, there were around 3,5 billion cumulative monthly users of the company’s products worldwide. With around 2.9 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most popular social media worldwide. With an audience of this scale, it is no surprise that the vast majority of Facebook’s revenue is generated through advertising.

              Facebook usage by device
              As of July 2021, it was found that 98.5 percent of active users accessed their Facebook account from mobile devices. In fact, almost 81.8 percent of Facebook audiences worldwide access the platform only via mobile phone. Facebook is not only available through mobile browser as the company has published several mobile apps for users to access their products and services. As of the third quarter 2021, the four core Meta products were leading the ranking of most downloaded mobile apps worldwide, with WhatsApp amassing approximately six billion downloads.

Overview

This dataset of medical misinformation was collected and is published by Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies (KInIT). It consists of approx. 317k news articles and blog posts on medical topics published between January 1, 1998 and February 1, 2022 from a total of 207 reliable and unreliable sources. The dataset contains full-texts of the articles, their original source URL and other extracted metadata. If a source has a credibility score available (e.g., from Media Bias/Fact Check), it is also included in the form of annotation. Besides the articles, the dataset contains around 3.5k fact-checks and extracted verified medical claims with their unified veracity ratings published by fact-checking organisations such as Snopes or FullFact. Lastly and most importantly, the dataset contains 573 manually and more than 51k automatically labelled mappings between previously verified claims and the articles; mappings consist of two values: claim presence (i.e., whether a claim is contained in the given article) and article stance (i.e., whether the given article supports or rejects the claim or provides both sides of the argument).

The dataset is primarily intended to be used as a training and evaluation set for machine learning methods for claim presence detection and article stance classification, but it enables a range of other misinformation related tasks, such as misinformation characterisation or analyses of misinformation spreading.

Its novelty and our main contributions lie in (1) focus on medical news article and blog posts as opposed to social media posts or political discussions; (2) providing multiple modalities (beside full-texts of the articles, there are also images and videos), thus enabling research of multimodal approaches; (3) mapping of the articles to the fact-checked claims (with manual as well as predicted labels); (4) providing source credibility labels for 95% of all articles and other potential sources of weak labels that can be mined from the articles' content and metadata.

The dataset is associated with the research paper "Monant Medical Misinformation Dataset: Mapping Articles to Fact-Checked Claims" accepted and presented at ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '22).

The accompanying Github repository provides a small static sample of the dataset and the dataset's descriptive analysis in a form of Jupyter notebooks.

In order to obtain an access to the full dataset (in the CSV format), please, request the access by following the instructions provided below.

Note: Please, check also our MultiClaim Dataset that provides a more recent, a larger, and a highly multilingual dataset of fact-checked claims, social media posts and relations between them.

References

If you use this dataset in any publication, project, tool or in any other form, please, cite the following papers:

@inproceedings{SrbaMonantPlatform,
  author = {Srba, Ivan and Moro, Robert and Simko, Jakub and Sevcech, Jakub and Chuda, Daniela and Navrat, Pavol and Bielikova, Maria},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of Workshop on Reducing Online Misinformation Exposure (ROME 2019)},
  pages = {1--7},
  title = {Monant: Universal and Extensible Platform for Monitoring, Detection and Mitigation of Antisocial Behavior},
  year = {2019}
}

@inproceedings{SrbaMonantMedicalDataset,
  author = {Srba, Ivan and Pecher, Branislav and Tomlein Matus and Moro, Robert and Stefancova, Elena and Simko, Jakub and Bielikova, Maria},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '22)},
  numpages = {11},
  title = {Monant Medical Misinformation Dataset: Mapping Articles to Fact-Checked Claims},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.1145/3477495.3531726},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3477495.3531726},
}

Dataset creation process

In order to create this dataset (and to continuously obtain new data), we used our research platform Monant. The Monant platform provides so called data providers to extract news articles/blogs from news/blog sites as well as fact-checking articles from fact-checking sites. General parsers (from RSS feeds, Wordpress sites, Google Fact Check Tool, etc.) as well as custom crawler and parsers were implemented (e.g., for fact checking site Snopes.com). All data is stored in the unified format in a central data storage.


Ethical considerations

The dataset was collected and is published for research purposes only. We collected only publicly available content of news/blog articles. The dataset contains identities of authors of the articles if they were stated in the original source; we left this information, since the presence of an author's name can be a strong credibility indicator. However, we anonymised the identities of the authors of discussion posts included in the dataset.

The main identified ethical issue related to the presented dataset lies in the risk of mislabelling of an article as supporting a false fact-checked claim and, to a lesser extent, in mislabelling an article as not containing a false claim or not supporting it when it actually does. To minimise these risks, we developed a labelling methodology and require an agreement of at least two independent annotators to assign a claim presence or article stance label to an article. It is also worth noting that we do not label an article as a whole as false or true. Nevertheless, we provide partial article-claim pair veracities based on the combination of claim presence and article stance labels.

As to the veracity labels of the fact-checked claims and the credibility (reliability) labels of the articles' sources, we take these from the fact-checking sites and external listings such as Media Bias/Fact Check as they are and refer to their methodologies for more details on how they were established.

Lastly, the dataset also contains automatically predicted labels of claim presence and article stance using our baselines described in the next section. These methods have their limitations and work with certain accuracy as reported in this paper. This should be taken into account when interpreting them.


Reporting mistakes in the dataset
The mean to report considerable mistakes in raw collected data or in manual annotations is by creating a new issue in the accompanying Github repository. Alternately, general enquiries or requests can be sent at info [at] kinit.sk.

Dataset structure

Raw data

At first, the dataset contains so called raw data (i.e., data extracted by the Web monitoring module of Monant platform and stored in exactly the same form as they appear at the original websites). Raw data consist of articles from news sites and blogs (e.g. naturalnews.com), discussions attached to such articles, fact-checking articles from fact-checking portals (e.g. snopes.com). In addition, the dataset contains feedback (number of likes, shares, comments) provided by user on social network Facebook which is regularly extracted for all news/blogs articles.

Raw data are contained in these CSV files:

• sources.csv
• articles.csv
• article_media.csv
• article_authors.csv
• discussion_posts.csv
• discussion_post_authors.csv
• fact_checking_articles.csv
• fact_checking_article_media.csv
• claims.csv
• feedback_facebook.csv

Note: Personal information about discussion posts' authors (name, website, gravatar) are anonymised.

Annotations

Secondly, the dataset contains so called annotations. Entity annotations describe the individual raw data entities (e.g., article, source). Relation annotations describe relation between two of such entities.

Each annotation is described by the following attributes:

1. category of annotation (`annotation_category`). Possible values: label (annotation corresponds to ground truth, determined by human experts) and prediction (annotation was created by means of AI method).
2. type of annotation (`annotation_type_id`). Example values: Source reliability (binary), Claim presence. The list of possible values can be obtained from enumeration in annotation_types.csv.
3. method which created annotation (`method_id`). Example values: Expert-based source reliability evaluation, Fact-checking article to claim transformation method. The list of possible values can be obtained from enumeration methods.csv.
4. its value (`value`). The value is stored in JSON format and its structure differs according to particular annotation type.

At the same time, annotations are associated with a particular object identified by:

1. entity type (parameter `entity_type` in case of entity annotations, or `source_entity_type` and `target_entity_type` in case of relation annotations). Possible values: sources, articles, fact-checking-articles.
2. entity id (parameter `entity_id` in case of entity annotations, or `source_entity_id` and `target_entity_id` in case of relation annotations).

The dataset provides specifically these entity

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. We present a large, high-coverage dataset of social interactions and user-generated content from Bluesky Social to address this pressing issue. The dataset contains the complete post history of over 4M users (81% of all registered accounts), totalling 235M posts. We also make available social data covering follow, comment, repost, and quote interactions. Since Bluesky allows users to create and like 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. This dataset allows novel 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.

The global social media penetration rate in was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 11.6 (+18.19 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the penetration rate is estimated to reach 75.31 and therefore a new peak in 2028. Notably, the social media penetration rate of was continuously increasing over the past years.

Facebook received 73,390 user data requests from federal agencies and courts in the United States during the second half of 2023. The social network produced some user data in 88.84 percent of requests from U.S. federal authorities. The United States accounts for the largest share of Facebook user data requests worldwide.

During a 2024 survey, 77 percent of respondents from Nigeria stated that they used social media as a source of news. In comparison, just 23 percent of Japanese respondents said the same. Large portions of social media users around the world admit that they do not trust social platforms either as media sources or as a way to get news, and yet they continue to access such networks on a daily basis.

              Social media: trust and consumption

              Despite the majority of adults surveyed in each country reporting that they used social networks to keep up to date with news and current affairs, a 2018 study showed that social media is the least trusted news source in the world. Less than 35 percent of adults in Europe considered social networks to be trustworthy in this respect, yet more than 50 percent of adults in Portugal, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Croatia said that they got their news on social media.

              What is clear is that we live in an era where social media is such an enormous part of daily life that consumers will still use it in spite of their doubts or reservations. Concerns about fake news and propaganda on social media have not stopped billions of users accessing their favorite networks on a daily basis.
              Most Millennials in the United States use social media for news every day, and younger consumers in European countries are much more likely to use social networks for national political news than their older peers.
              Like it or not, reading news on social is fast becoming the norm for younger generations, and this form of news consumption will likely increase further regardless of whether consumers fully trust their chosen network or not.

Youtube social network and ground-truth communities

https://snap.stanford.edu/data/com-Youtube.html

Dataset information

Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/) is a video-sharing web site that includes a social network. In the Youtube social network, users form friendship each other and users can create groups which other users can join. We consider
such user-defined groups as ground-truth communities. This data is provided by Alan Mislove et al.
(http://socialnetworks.mpi-sws.org/data-imc2007.html)

We regard each connected component in a group as a separate ground-truth
community. We remove the ground-truth communities which have less than 3
nodes. We also provide the top 5,000 communities with highest quality
which are described in our paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.6233). As for
the network, we provide the largest connected component.

Network statistics
Nodes 1,134,890
Edges 2,987,624
Nodes in largest WCC 1134890 (1.000)
Edges in largest WCC 2987624 (1.000)
Nodes in largest SCC 1134890 (1.000)
Edges in largest SCC 2987624 (1.000)
Average clustering coefficient 0.0808
Number of triangles 3056386
Fraction of closed triangles 0.002081
Diameter (longest shortest path) 20
90-percentile effective diameter 6.5
Community statistics
Number of communities 8,385
Average community size 13.50
Average membership size 0.10

Source (citation)
J. Yang and J. Leskovec. Defining and Evaluating Network Communities based on Ground-truth. ICDM, 2012. http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.6233

Files
File Description
com-youtube.ungraph.txt.gz Undirected Youtube network
com-youtube.all.cmty.txt.gz Youtube communities
com-youtube.top5000.cmty.txt.gz Youtube communities (Top 5,000)

Notes on inclusion into the SuiteSparse Matrix Collection, July 2018:

The graph in the SNAP data set is 1-based, with nodes numbered 1 to
1,157,827.

In the SuiteSparse Matrix Collection, Problem.A is the undirected Youtube
network, a matrix of size n-by-n with n=1,134,890, which is the number of
unique user id's appearing in any edge.

Problem.aux.nodeid is a list of the node id's that appear in the SNAP data set. A(i,j)=1 if person nodeid(i) is friends with person nodeid(j). The
node id's are the same as the SNAP data set (1-based).

C = Problem.aux.Communities_all is a sparse matrix of size n by 16,386
which represents the communities in the com-youtube.all.cmty.txt file.
The kth line in that file defines the kth community, and is the column
C(:,k), where C(i,k)=1 if person ...

Social media companies are starting to offer users the option to subscribe to their platforms in exchange for monthly fees. Until recently, social media has been predominantly free to use, with tech companies relying on advertising as their main revenue generator. However, advertising revenues have been dropping following the COVID-induced boom. As of July 2023, Meta Verified is the most costly of the subscription services, setting users back almost 15 U.S. dollars per month on iOS or Android. Twitter Blue costs between eight and 11 U.S. dollars per month and ensures users will receive the blue check mark, and have the ability to edit tweets and have NFT profile pictures. Snapchat+, drawing in four million users as of the second quarter of 2023, boasts a Story re-watch function, custom app icons, and a Snapchat+ badge.

A global survey conducted in the third quarter of 2024 found that the main reason for using social media was to keep in touch with friends and family, with over 50.8 percent of social media users saying this was their main reason for using online networks. Overall, 39 percent of social media users said that filling spare time was their main reason for using social media platforms, whilst 34.5 percent of respondents said they used it to read news stories. Less than one in five users were on social platforms for the reason of following celebrities and influencers.

              The most popular social network

              Facebook dominates the social media landscape. The world's most popular social media platform turned 20 in February 2024, and it continues to lead the way in terms of user numbers. As of February 2025, the social network had over three billion global users. YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp follow, but none of these well-known brands can surpass Facebook’s audience size.
              Moreover, as of the final quarter of 2023, there were almost four billion Meta product users.

              Ever-evolving social media usage

              The utilization of social media remains largely gratuitous; however, companies have been encouraging users to become paid subscribers to reduce dependence on advertising profits. Meta Verified entices users by offering a blue verification badge and proactive account protection, among other things. X (formerly Twitter), Snapchat, and Reddit also offer users the chance to upgrade their social media accounts for a monthly free.

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.