This is arguably the beginning of social media as we know it. The first social media site to reach a million monthly active users was MySpace – it achieved this milestone around 2004. We begin with an outline of key trends and conclude with a perspective on the rate of adoption of social media relative to other modern communication technologies.

Who uses social media? When did the rise of social media start and how has its usership changed over time? Here we answer these and other key questions to understand the history of social media use around the world. The rapid and vast adoption of these technologies is changing how we find partners, how we access information from the news, and how we organize to demand political change. This means social media platforms were used by one-in-three people in the world, and more than two-thirds of all internet users. These numbers are huge – in 2019 there were 7.7 billion people in the world, with at least 3.5 billion of online.

Other social media platforms including Youtube and Whatsapp also had more than one billion users each. Cite this article Reuse our work freely Note – This article was first published in 2019, and due to poor data availability on users of social media platforms will not be updated over time.įacebook, the largest social media platform in the world, had 2.4 billion users in 2019.

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