Who uses social media? When did the rise of social media start, and how has the number of users changed over time? Here we answer these and other key questions to understand the history of social media worldwide. The rapid and vast adoption of these technologies is changing how we find partners, access information from the news, and organize to demand political change. This means social media platforms were used by one in three people worldwide and more than two-thirds of all Internet users. These numbers are huge – in 2019, there were 7.7 billion people worldwide, with at least 3.5 billion online. Other social media platforms, including YouTube and WhatsApp, also had over one billion users each. Due to data availability, the article and charts will not be updated.įacebook, the largest social media platform in the world, had 2.4 billion users in 2019.

This article is an archived version of an article published in 2019.