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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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

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

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.

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

Today the average time spent on social media is 2 hours and 24 minutes today for people aged 16 to 64.

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.

In this post, I'll give you all the social media addiction statistics you need to be aware of to moderate your social media use.

Percentage of individuals using the internet for participating in social networks (creating a user profile, posting messages or other contributions) for private purposes, within the last 3 months prior to the survey. Expressed as a percentage of all individuals aged between 16 and 74 years old surveyed. Data based on the annual EU survey on the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in households and by individuals.

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.

General data recollected for the studio " Analysis of the Quantitative Impact of Social Networks on Web Traffic of Cybermedia in the 27 Countries of the European Union". Four research questions are posed: what percentage of the total web traffic generated by cybermedia in the European Union comes from social networks? Is said percentage higher or lower than that provided through direct traffic and through the use of search engines via SEO positioning? Which social networks have a greater impact? And is there any degree of relationship between the specific weight of social networks in the web traffic of a cybermedia and circumstances such as the average duration of the user's visit, the number of page views or the bounce rate understood in its formal aspect of not performing any kind of interaction on the visited page beyond reading its content? To answer these questions, we have first proceeded to a selection of the cybermedia with the highest web traffic of the 27 countries that are currently part of the European Union after the United Kingdom left on December 31, 2020. In each nation we have selected five media using a combination of the global web traffic metrics provided by the tools Alexa (https://www.alexa.com/), which ceased to be operational on May 1, 2022, and SimilarWeb (https:// www.similarweb.com/). We have not used local metrics by country since the results obtained with these first two tools were sufficiently significant and our objective is not to establish a ranking of cybermedia by nation but to examine the relevance of social networks in their web traffic. In all cases, cybermedia whose property corresponds to a journalistic company have been selected, ruling out those belonging to telecommunications portals or service providers; in some cases they correspond to classic information companies (both newspapers and televisions) while in others they refer to digital natives, without this circumstance affecting the nature of the research proposed. Below we have proceeded to examine the web traffic data of said cybermedia. The period corresponding to the months of October, November and December 2021 and January, February and March 2022 has been selected. We believe that this six-month stretch allows possible one-time variations to be overcome for a month, reinforcing the precision of the data obtained. To secure this data, we have used the SimilarWeb tool, currently the most precise tool that exists when examining the web traffic of a portal, although it is limited to that coming from desktops and laptops, without taking into account those that come from mobile devices, currently impossible to determine with existing measurement tools on the market. It includes: Web traffic general data: average visit duration, pages per visit and bounce rate Web traffic origin by country Percentage of traffic generated from social media over total web traffic Distribution of web traffic generated from social networks Comparison of web traffic generated from social netwoks with direct and search procedures

90% of people aged 18-29 use social media in some form. 15% of people aged 23-38 admit that they are addicted to social media.

Over the past decade, there has been a rapid growth of social media. Much of the problem lies with the new potential for constant social comparisons. Social media also adds a new layer of interaction that can occur anywhere, at any time, with anyone. This allows for a higher quantity of relationships, but strips the depth of these relationships. Does increased social media use affect quality of life? I hypothesize that the more social media sites a respondent is a member or regular user of, the more time he or she reports feeling depressed or lonely. I used a sample of 628 respondents as part of in-person interviews conducted by the 2016 General Social Survey. The results found that overall about 51 percent of the people claimed to feel depressed or lonely none of the time. Meaning that about half of respondents do feel depressed or lonely at least some of the time. The most statistically significant finding revealed that the higher ones income, the less one reports feeling depressed or lonely. However, the hypothesis must be rejected because there is no statistical significance between social media usage and quality of life. Social media site usage does not result in increased feelings of depression or loneliness. Based on the income results, does money buy happiness? Those of lower socio-economic class may not have access to proper medical care and therefore do not get adequate treatment for mental illnesses. Structural forces might be having a direct impact.

Many have argued that digital technologies such as smartphones and social media are addictive. We develop an economic model of digital addiction and estimate it using a randomized experiment. Temporary incentives to reduce social media use have persistent effects, suggesting social media are habit forming. Allowing people to set limits on their future screen time substantially reduces use, suggesting self-control problems. Additional evidence suggests people are inattentive to habit formation and partially unaware of self-control problems. Looking at these facts through the lens of our model suggests that self-control problems cause 31 percent of social media use.

Teenagers are the 2nd largest group of people affected by social media addiction. Teens ages 13 to 18 years old spend a significant amount of their free time on social media with an average of 3 hours a day.