Social media connects billions of accounts, but there is no single measure of its influence. Audience size, time spent, age differences and news consumption each reveal a different part of the picture. These ten interactive charts explore the growth of social media, the platforms people use, and how habits vary across countries and generations. International comparisons draw mainly on GWI surveys reported in Digital 2026; detailed age and teenage comparisons use clearly labelled US surveys from Pew Research Center. Explore the charts, then use the country reference table to compare adoption, time spent and the number of platforms used.
International comparisons: GWI Q2 2025. US age and teen surveys: 2025; US news series: through 2026. Hover, tap or use the selectors to explore.
The published global series rises from fewer than 40 million social media user identities in 2000 to 5.66 billion in 2025. The scale of that change is striking, but the unit matters: identities are not a verified count of distinct people. A person may hold several accounts, and the underlying platforms and estimation methods have changed. The chart therefore separates the older series from the 2024–2025 segment, following the source’s warning about a methodology change in July 2024. The space between the segments is deliberate. It prevents the change in measurement from looking like an ordinary year of growth. Even within each segment, the series is best read as an estimate of the expanding reach of the social ecosystem. It does not measure how frequently people log in, whether accounts are active every day, or how much attention they devote to each service. Those questions require the survey measures used below.
Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp form a closely grouped leading tier in this international survey. Each reaches more than half of the surveyed online population aged 16 and over in a typical month. That is a different comparison from ranking company-reported monthly active users: every bar here comes from the same survey framework and reference period. Respondents can use several services, so the percentages are not slices of one audience and should never be added together. The inclusion of messaging, video and professional networks also shows how broad the modern social platform category has become. Country availability matters, especially for services associated with China and for platforms restricted in particular markets. A small difference between adjacent bars should not be interpreted as a decisive competitive lead. This chart measures self-reported reach, rather than revenue, time spent or the intensity of use; those rankings could look quite different.
■ Under 90% ■ 90–under 95% ■ 95–under 98% ■ 98–under 99% ■ 99–100% ■ No data
Social networks and messaging services reach nearly all surveyed internet users in many of the countries shown. The map measures adoption within the online population aged 16 and over. It does not claim that almost everyone in the country is online, or that children and older offline residents use social media. That distinction is particularly important when comparing countries with very different levels of internet access. Ghana and Morocco round to 100% in this survey, while Japan is lower at 86.8%. A rounded 100% is a survey estimate, not a census finding that every individual uses a platform. The colour scale highlights differences within a relatively narrow range, and grey countries have no observation in this extract. Use the country selector to inspect exact percentages, including smaller territories that are difficult to point to on the map. Differences in survey coverage and age composition also limit how finely these markets should be ranked.
A smartphone can carry private messages, public posts, video, news and shopping links in the same pocket. That makes ‘social media use’ a broad category rather than one uniform activity. The international comparisons on this page include social networks and messaging services, while individual charts identify their precise survey question. A photograph of people using phones illustrates the shared device, but cannot tell us which apps they have open or why they are using them. The statistics come from the cited surveys, not from an interpretation of the people pictured. Separating the device from the activity helps keep those comparisons meaningful.
The US age profile makes clear why an overall platform ranking can conceal very different audiences. Instagram is used by 80% of adults aged 18–29, compared with 19% of those aged 65 and over. Snapchat and TikTok also show large gaps between the youngest and oldest groups. YouTube has a much broader age reach: it is used by a majority in every age category shown. Facebook follows a different pattern, with reported use highest among adults aged 30–49 rather than among the youngest adults. These results come from a US adult survey and should not be relabelled as worldwide demographics. They measure whether respondents ever use a service, not their share of its audience or their daily activity. A platform can have a strong younger profile and still contain many older users because the population sizes of age groups differ. Select a cell for its exact percentage and compare patterns across rows and columns.
Sources: Pew Research Center, Americans’ Social Media Use 2025. Pew US adults, 5 February–18 June 2025, n=5,022. Ever use of each platform. Each cell uses its age-group denominator. Not global demographics, daily use or share of a platform audience. Published rounded percentages; no adjustment for sampling error.
5. Time spent on social media by country
Reported time devoted to social feeds and short videos varies widely across the surveyed markets. Kenya and the Philippines sit near the top, while Japan and Hong Kong report much shorter weekly totals. The default view shows the highest and lowest ten observations together, allowing the scale of the contrast to remain readable; the selector also provides all available markets. This measure includes time spent browsing posts, stories and advertisements alongside short videos such as TikToks and Reels. It is self-reported time, not a passive measurement collected from everyone’s phone. GWI changed its time-use questions in late 2024, so these values should not be joined directly to older daily social media series. The country table translates the weekly totals into average minutes per day by dividing by seven. That conversion makes comparison convenient, but does not imply that every day is alike or that the typical individual follows the national average.
The comparison between 2022 and 2025 shows continuity at the top of the US teenage platform landscape alongside changes elsewhere. YouTube remains the most widely used service in this selection, while TikTok and Instagram reach clear majorities. WhatsApp rises from 17% to 24%, whereas X falls from 23% to 16%. Snapchat also declines over the interval. The connecting lines show percentage-point differences between two separate surveys, not the movements of the same individuals. They cannot tell us whether someone left one platform in order to join another. Small differences may reflect sampling variation, so the chart should not turn every movement into a major trend. The comparison starts in 2022 because all eight selected services have observations in both years. Using an earlier starting point would introduce missing platforms and changes in what was asked. These are US teenagers aged 13–17, and the results describe platform use rather than daily engagement.
Sources: Pew Research Center, Teens, Social Media and AI Chatbots 2025. Pew US teens aged 13–17, 2022 and 2025. 2025 fieldwork: 25 September–9 October, n=1,458. Repeated cross-sectional surveys, not a panel tracking the same individuals. Twitter is labelled X for consistency. Small changes are not necessarily statistically significant.
7. Why people use social media
Keeping in touch remains the most frequently selected reason for using social media in this survey, cited by about half of social media users. Filling spare time and reading news follow, showing that social services combine personal communication with entertainment and information. Product discovery, inspiration and brand content also appear, but they are parts of a wider collection of motivations rather than the whole story. Respondents could give more than one reason, so the bars overlap and do not sum to 100%. A person may keep up with friends, follow sport and discover a product during the same visit. The numbers also describe stated motives, which need not match how time is actually allocated. Someone may open an app to answer a message and then spend much longer watching videos. Reading this chart alongside the time-use and audience-overlap charts helps distinguish why people say they visit from how broad and intensive their activity becomes.
Social media audiences can also be contributors: a phone makes it possible to photograph an event, record a clip or share a reaction. Yet creating content is only one possible form of participation. Someone may use a platform regularly while mostly reading messages or watching other people’s work. The charts here measure reported use, motives and frequency; they do not divide everyone into fixed categories of creators and spectators. This photograph shows a person taking a picture, without implying that it was posted online. That distinction is useful when interpreting platform reach: access to a service tells us less than the specific activity being measured.
Social platforms usually share their audiences with several competitors. This heatmap reads across each row: of the users of the row platform, what percentage also use the column platform? The direction is essential. For example, the share of Snapchat users who also use Instagram is different from the share of Instagram users who also use Snapchat. The two services have different audience bases, so the matrix is not expected to be symmetrical. The diagonal is deliberately muted because a platform’s overlap with itself adds no information. High overlap helps explain why adding platform audience totals exaggerates the number of people reached. It also suggests that many users choose a collection of services for different purposes rather than a single exclusive network. The figures refer to monthly survey use and exclude China in the source table. They measure shared audiences, not sharing of personal data between companies, simultaneous use, or the frequency with which people move between apps.
Reach and frequency describe different aspects of teenage social media use. YouTube has the broadest reach among the five services shown, and its daily categories account for a large majority of US teens. TikTok has a smaller overall audience but a larger share reporting almost constant use than YouTube. Facebook is used much less intensively by this age group. Each bar is based on all teenagers in the survey, including those who do not use that platform, so the widths remain comparable. The frequency categories are self-descriptions rather than device logs: ‘almost constantly’ has no fixed number of minutes attached. Published percentages are rounded independently, and small unallocated amounts can reflect rounding or unanswered questions. They are not silently redistributed among categories. The chart therefore conveys the balance between frequent, occasional and non-use without implying a diagnosis or a direct measure of wellbeing. Different activities within the same app may also have very different purposes.
Sources: Pew Research Center, Teens, Social Media and AI Chatbots 2025. Pew US teens, September–October 2025, all-teens base. Six mutually exclusive published categories shown. Totals of 99% for TikTok, Snapchat and Facebook are left as published; omitted small/nonresponses and independent rounding are not allocated. Almost constantly has no fixed time threshold.
10. Social media as a source of news
Social media is a recurring source of news for a substantial share of US adults, but occasional exposure and frequent use should be distinguished. The stacked areas preserve Pew’s four response categories: often, sometimes, rarely and never. In 2026, 26% say they often get news this way and another 33% say sometimes. Together that is 59%, compared with 53% in 2020. The path between those endpoints is uneven rather than a simple uninterrupted rise. This question captures news encountered through social media broadly; it does not say which platform supplied it or whether the respondent deliberately sought it out. It also does not measure trust in that news, accuracy, political influence or replacement of every other news source. Each year is a survey snapshot, and the connecting areas are visual guides between observations. Small gaps below 100% are left visible where rounded published categories do not sum exactly to the full sample.
Sources: Pew Research Center, Social Media and News Fact Sheet (2026). Pew US adults, 2020–2026. 2026 fieldwork: 24–30 August, n=5,166. Percent who get news on social media often/sometimes/rarely/never. Published totals of 99% in some years are not rescaled; rounding/nonresponse leaves small unfilled space. Areas connect survey snapshots, not continuous observations.
Social media by country
GWI Q2 2025, surveyed internet users aged 16+. Social use = social network or messenger in the past month. Daily minutes = published weekly social-feed + short-video minutes ÷ 7, rounded to one decimal. Platforms = average number actively used monthly, including YouTube. A dash means unavailable in the source extract, not zero. Geographic coverage and older-age inclusion vary. These are online-population measures, not shares of all residents.
