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.

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.

As of April 2024, Bahrain was the country with the highest Instagram audience reach with 95.6 percent. Kazakhstan also had a high Instagram audience penetration rate, with 90.8 percent of the population using the social network. In the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Brunei, the photo-sharing platform was used by more than 85 percent of each country's population.

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.

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

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.

As of April 2024, Facebook had an addressable ad audience reach 131.1 percent in Libya, followed by the United Arab Emirates with 120.5 percent and Mongolia with 116 percent. Additionally, the Philippines and Qatar had addressable ad audiences of 114.5 percent and 111.7 percent.

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

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

The results of which gender uses which platforms are in.

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

In 2023, Meta Platforms had a total annual revenue of over 134 billion U.S. dollars, up from 116 billion in 2022. LinkedIn reported its highest annual revenue to date, generating over 15 billion USD, whilst Snapchat reported an annual revenue of 4.6 billion USD.

This dataset covers the use of social media to influence politics by promoting propaganda, advocating controversial viewpoints, and spreading disinformation. Influence efforts are defined as: (i) coordinated campaigns by a state, or the ruling party in an autocracy, to impact one or more specific aspects of politics at home or in another state, (ii) through media channels, including social media, by (iii) producing content designed to appear indigenous to the target state. Our data draw on more than 1000 media reports and 500 research articles/reports to identify IEs, track their progress, and classify their features. The data cover 78 foreign influence efforts (FIEs) and 25 domestic influence efforts (DIEs)—in which governments targeted their own citizens—against 51 different countries from 2011 through early-2021. The Influence Effort dataset measures covert information campaigns by state actors, facilitating research on contemporary statecraft.

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.

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.

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

Over 210 million people worldwide suffer from social media addiction.

Inspiration

Which countries have the most social contacts in the world? In particular, do countries with more social contacts among the elderly report more deaths caused by a pandemic caused by a respiratory virus?

Context

With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, reports have shown that the elderly are at a higher risk of dying than any other age groups. 8 out of 10 deaths reported in the U.S. have been in adults 65 years old and older. Countries have also began to enforce 2km social distancing to contain the pandemic.

To this end, I wanted to explore the relationship between social contacts among the elderly and its relationship with the number of COVID-19 deaths across countries.

Content

This dataset includes a subset of the projected social contact matrices in 152 countries from surveys Prem et al. 2020. It was based on the POLYMOD study where information on social contacts was obtained using cross-sectional surveys in Belgium (BE), Germany (DE), Finland (FI), Great Britain (GB), Italy (IT), Luxembourg (LU), The Netherlands (NL), and Poland (PL) between May 2005 and September 2006.

This dataset includes contact rates from study participants ages 65+ for all countries from all sources of contact (work, home, school and others).

I used this R code to extract this data:

load('../input/contacts.Rdata') # https://github.com/kieshaprem/covid19-agestructureSEIR-wuhan-social-distancing/blob/master/data/contacts.Rdata
View(contacts)
contacts[["ALB"]][["home"]]
contacts[["ITA"]][["all"]]
rowSums(contacts[["ALB"]][["all"]])
out1 = data.frame(); for (n in names(contacts)) { x = (contacts[[n]][["all"]])[16,]; out <- rbind(out, data.frame(x)) }
out2 = data.frame(); for (n in names(contacts)) { x = (contacts[[n]][["all"]])[15,]; out <- rbind(out, data.frame(x)) }
out3 = data.frame(); for (n in names(contacts)) { x = (contacts[[n]][["all"]])[14,]; out <- rbind(out, data.frame(x)) }
m1 = data.frame(t(matrix(unlist(out1), nrow=16)))
m2 = data.frame(t(matrix(unlist(out2), nrow=16)))
m3 = data.frame(t(matrix(unlist(out3), nrow=16)))
rownames(m1) = names(contacts)
colnames(m1) = c("00_04", "05_09", "10_14", "15_19", "20_24", "25_29", "30_34", "35_39", "40_44", "45_49", "50_54", "55_59", "60_64", "65_69", "70_74", "75_79")
rownames(m2) = rownames(m1)
rownames(m3) = rownames(m1)
colnames(m2) = colnames(m1)
colnames(m3) = colnames(m1)
write.csv(zapsmall(m1),"contacts_75_79.csv", row.names = TRUE)
write.csv(zapsmall(m2),"contacts_70_74.csv", row.names = TRUE)
write.csv(zapsmall(m3),"contacts_65_69.csv", row.names = TRUE)

Rows names correspond to the 3 letter country ISO code, e.g. ITA represents Italy. Column names are the age groups of the individuals contacted in 5 year intervals from 0 to 80 years old. Cell values are the projected mean social contact rate.

https://www.googleapis.com/download/storage/v1/b/kaggle-user-content/o/inbox%2F1139998%2Ffa3ddc065ea46009e345f24ab0d905d2%2Fcontact_distribution.png?generation=1588258740223812&alt=media" alt="">

Acknowledgements

Thanks goes to Dr. Kiesha Prem for her correspondence and her team for publishing their work on social contact matrices.

References

• The effect of control strategies to reduce social mixing on outcomes of the COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan, China: a modelling study
• Projecting social contact matrices in 152 countries using contact surveys and demographic data
• Social Contacts and Mixing Patterns Relevant to the Spread of Infectious Diseases (POLYMOD study)

Related resources

• My starter notebook
• http://www.socialcontactdata.org/
• https://www.kaggle.com/tsubasatwi/close-contact-status-of-corona-in-japan
• Facebook Data for Good Mobility Dashboard