Nearly five billion people (4.88 billion) are active on social networks, or 60.6% of the world’s population, according to the quarterly State of the Internet statistical report, cited by AFP.

This level, calculated by digital usage specialist Kepios, is up 3.7% year-on-year.

At the same time, the population of the planet grew by less than 1% this year.

Thus, the number of social media users is approaching the number of Internet users, who account for at least 64.5% of the world’s population (5.19 billion), but growth has slowed dramatically since the Covid-19 pandemic.

More than half (53.6%) of users worldwide are male, the report said, although it acknowledged that there was some inaccuracy due to automated accounts and people signing up under different names.

Some regions of the world are still far behind: only one person in 11 uses social networks in Central and Eastern Africa. And in India, which is now the most populous country, less than a third of the population is registered on social networks.

I spent about two and a half hours a day

Time spent on social media increased by two minutes per day to 2 hours and 26 minutes per day, with a wide difference: 3 hours and 49 minutes in Brazil, less than an hour in Japan and 1 hour and 46 minutes in France.

On average, social network users use more than 7 platforms. The American group Meta appears 3 times in the top of favorite applications along with Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook.

Next come three Chinese apps (Wechat, TikTok and its local version Douyin), followed by Twitter, Messenger and Telegram.