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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

This dataset captures insights from a survey on social media usage across diverse age groups and genders. It includes data on the most used platforms, daily screen time, reasons for usage, preferred content types, and how social media influences buying decisions. Additionally, it reflects users' concerns about privacy and their willingness to reduce usage. The dataset is useful for analyzing digital behavior, content preferences, and the social impact of online platforms. It can support research in marketing, psychology, and digital well-being, offering a snapshot of how people interact with and perceive social media in their daily lives.

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.

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

As of April 2024, it was found that men between the ages of 25 and 34 years made up Facebook largest audience, accounting for 18.4 percent of global users. Additionally, Facebook's second largest audience base could be found with men aged 18 to 24 years.

              Facebook connects the world

              Founded in 2004 and going public in 2012, Facebook is one of the biggest internet companies in the world with influence that goes beyond social media. It is widely considered as one of the Big Four tech companies, along with Google, Apple, and Amazon (all together known under the acronym GAFA). Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide and the company also owns three other billion-user properties: mobile messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger,
              as well as photo-sharing app Instagram. Facebook usersThe vast majority of Facebook users connect to the social network via mobile devices. This is unsurprising, as Facebook has many users in mobile-first online markets. Currently, India ranks first in terms of Facebook audience size with 378 million users. The United States, Brazil, and Indonesia also all have more than 100 million Facebook users each.

The results of which gender uses which platforms are in.

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.

This database is comprised of 951 participants who provided self-report data online in their school classrooms. The data was collected in 2016 and 2017. The dataset is comprised of 509 males (54%) and 442 females (46%). Their ages ranged from 12 to 16 years (M = 13.69, SD = 0.72). Seven participants did not report their age. The majority were born in Australia (N = 849, 89%). The next most common countries of birth were China (N = 24, 2.5%), the UK (N = 23, 2.4%), and the USA (N = 9, 0.9%). Data were drawn from students at five Australian independent secondary schools. The data contains item responses for the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS; Spence, 1998) which is comprised of 44 items. The Social media question asked about frequency of use with the question “How often do you use social media?”. The response options ranged from constantly to once a week or less. Items measuring Fear of Missing Out were included and incorporated the following five questions based on the APS Stress and Wellbeing in Australia Survey (APS, 2015). These were “When I have a good time it is important for me to share the details online; I am afraid that I will miss out on something if I don’t stay connected to my online social networks; I feel worried and uncomfortable when I can’t access my social media accounts; I find it difficult to relax or sleep after spending time on social networking sites; I feel my brain burnout with the constant connectivity of social media. Internal consistency for this measure was α = .81. Self compassion was measured using the 12-item short-form of the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS-SF; Raes et al., 2011). The data set has the option of downloading an excel file (composed of two worksheet tabs) or CSV files 1) Data and 2) Variable labels. References: Australian Psychological Society. (2015). Stress and wellbeing in Australia survey. https://www.headsup.org.au/docs/default-source/default-document-library/stress-and-wellbeing-in-australia-report.pdf?sfvrsn=7f08274d_4 Raes, F., Pommier, E., Neff, K. D., & Van Gucht, D. (2011). Construction and factorial validation of a short form of the self-compassion scale. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 18(3), 250-255. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.702 Spence, S. H. (1998). A measure of anxiety symptoms among children. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 36(5), 545-566. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(98)00034-5

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

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.

Facebook and YouTube are still the most used social media platforms today.

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

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.

Overview
The Controllable Multimodal Feedback Synthesis (CMFeed) Dataset is designed to enable the generation of sentiment-controlled feedback from multimodal inputs, including text and images. This dataset can be used to train feedback synthesis models in both uncontrolled and sentiment-controlled manners. Serving a crucial role in advancing research, the CMFeed dataset supports the development of human-like feedback synthesis, a novel task defined by the dataset's authors. Additionally, the corresponding feedback synthesis models and benchmark results are presented in the associated code and research publication.

Task Uniqueness: The task of controllable multimodal feedback synthesis is unique, distinct from LLMs and tasks like VisDial, and not addressed by multi-modal LLMs. LLMs often exhibit errors and hallucinations, as evidenced by their auto-regressive and black-box nature, which can obscure the influence of different modalities on the generated responses [Ref1; Ref2]. Our approach includes an interpretability mechanism, as detailed in the supplementary material of the corresponding research publication, demonstrating how metadata and multimodal features shape responses and learn sentiments. This controllability and interpretability aim to inspire new methodologies in related fields.

Data Collection and Annotation
Data was collected by crawling Facebook posts from major news outlets, adhering to ethical and legal standards. The comments were annotated using four sentiment analysis models: FLAIR, SentimentR, RoBERTa, and DistilBERT. Facebook was chosen for dataset construction because of the following factors:
• Facebook was chosen for data collection because it uniquely provides metadata such as news article link, post shares, post reaction, comment like, comment rank, comment reaction rank, and relevance scores, not available on other platforms.
• Facebook is the most used social media platform, with 3.07 billion monthly users, compared to 550 million Twitter and 500 million Reddit users. [Ref]
• Facebook is popular across all age groups (18-29, 30-49, 50-64, 65+), with at least 58% usage, compared to 6% for Twitter and 3% for Reddit. [Ref]. Trends are similar for gender, race, ethnicity, income, education, community, and political affiliation [Ref]
• The male-to-female user ratio on Facebook is 56.3% to 43.7%; on Twitter, it's 66.72% to 23.28%; Reddit does not report this data. [Ref]

Filtering Process: To ensure high-quality and reliable data, the dataset underwent two levels of filtering:
a) Model Agreement Filtering: Retained only comments where at least three out of the four models agreed on the sentiment.
b) Probability Range Safety Margin: Comments with a sentiment probability between 0.49 and 0.51, indicating low confidence in sentiment classification, were excluded.
After filtering, 4,512 samples were marked as XX. Though these samples have been released for the reader's understanding, they were not used in training the feedback synthesis model proposed in the corresponding research paper.

Dataset Description
• Total Samples: 61,734
• Total Samples Annotated: 57,222 after filtering.
• Total Posts: 3,646
• Average Likes per Post: 65.1
• Average Likes per Comment: 10.5
• Average Length of News Text: 655 words
• Average Number of Images per Post: 3.7

Components of the Dataset
The dataset comprises two main components:
• CMFeed.csv File: Contains metadata, comment, and reaction details related to each post.
• Images Folder: Contains folders with images corresponding to each post.

Data Format and Fields of the CSV File
The dataset is structured in CMFeed.csv file along with corresponding images in related folders. This CSV file includes the following fields:
• Id: Unique identifier
• Post: The heading of the news article.
• News_text: The text of the news article.
• News_link: URL link to the original news article.
• News_Images: A path to the folder containing images related to the post.
• Post_shares: Number of times the post has been shared.
• Post_reaction: A JSON object capturing reactions (like, love, etc.) to the post and their counts.
• Comment: Text of the user comment.
• Comment_like: Number of likes on the comment.
• Comment_reaction_rank: A JSON object detailing the type and count of reactions the comment received.
• Comment_link: URL link to the original comment on Facebook.
• Comment_rank: Rank of the comment based on engagement and relevance.
• Score: Sentiment score computed based on the consensus of sentiment analysis models.
• Agreement: Indicates the consensus level among the sentiment models, ranging from -4 (all negative) to 4 (all positive). 3 negative and 1 positive will result into -2 and 3 positives and 1 negative will result into +2.
• Sentiment_class: Categorizes the sentiment of the comment into 1 (positive) or 0 (negative).

More Considerations During Dataset Construction
We thoroughly considered issues such as the choice of social media platform for data collection, bias and generalizability of the data, selection of news handles/websites, ethical protocols, privacy and potential misuse before beginning data collection. While achieving completely unbiased and fair data is unattainable, we endeavored to minimize biases and ensure as much generalizability as possible. Building on these considerations, we made the following decisions about data sources and handling to ensure the integrity and utility of the dataset:

• Why not merge data from different social media platforms? We chose not to merge data from platforms such as Reddit and Twitter with Facebook due to the lack of comprehensive metadata, clear ethical guidelines, and control mechanisms—such as who can comment and whether users' anonymity is maintained—on these platforms other than Facebook. These factors are critical for our analysis. Our focus on Facebook alone was crucial to ensure consistency in data quality and format.

• Choice of four news handles: We selected four news handles—BBC News, Sky News, Fox News, and NY Daily News—to ensure diversity and comprehensive regional coverage. These news outlets were chosen for their distinct regional focuses and editorial perspectives: BBC News is known for its global coverage with a centrist view, Sky News offers geographically targeted and politically varied content learning center/right in the UK/EU/US, Fox News is recognized for its right-leaning content in the US, and NY Daily News provides left-leaning coverage in New York. Many other news handles such as NDTV, The Hindu, Xinhua, and SCMP are also large-scale but may contain information in regional languages such as Indian and Chinese, hence, they have not been selected. This selection ensures a broad spectrum of political discourse and audience engagement.

• Dataset Generalizability and Bias: With 3.07 billion of the total 5 billion social media users, the extensive user base of Facebook, reflective of broader social media engagement patterns, ensures that the insights gained are applicable across various platforms, reducing bias and strengthening the generalizability of our findings. Additionally, the geographic and political diversity of these news sources, ranging from local (NY Daily News) to international (BBC News), and spanning political spectra from left (NY Daily News) to right (Fox News), ensures a balanced representation of global and political viewpoints in our dataset. This approach not only mitigates regional and ideological biases but also enriches the dataset with a wide array of perspectives, further solidifying the robustness and applicability of our research.

• Dataset size and diversity: Facebook prohibits the automatic scraping of its users' personal data. In compliance with this policy, we manually scraped publicly available data. This labor-intensive process requiring around 800 hours of manual effort, limited our data volume but allowed for precise selection. We followed ethical protocols for scraping Facebook data , selecting 1000 posts from each of the four news handles to enhance diversity and reduce bias. Initially, 4000 posts were collected; after preprocessing (detailed in Section 3.1), 3646 posts remained. We then processed all associated comments, resulting in a total of 61734 comments. This manual method ensures adherence to Facebook’s policies and the integrity of our dataset.

Ethical considerations, data privacy and misuse prevention
The data collection adheres to Facebook’s ethical guidelines [<a href="https://developers.facebook.com/terms/"