This wasn’t the best week for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. A Los Angeles jury found the social media giant liable for deliberately creating addictive platforms for children. Meta was only one part of the lawsuit; the other was Google’s YouTube. Both companies were found at fault and fined millions of dollars.
Claiming anxiety and depression, the unnamed 20-year-old woman made her case that algorithms and crafty inventions such as “infinite scrolling” were the cause of her mental health issues. Most agree that such a ruling opens Pandora’s box, encouraging similar legal actions to flood court dockets.
If the stock market is a harbinger of what is to come, these digital platforms may be in for a bumpy road ahead. Meta stock dropped just over 12.5% this week after the verdict was announced. Whether one agrees with the outcome of this trial or not, social media companies are finding the waters turbulent as they try to navigate an extremely complex legal environment.
Social Media: Who’s Up and Who’s Down
It’s becoming increasingly common to ban children from using social media platforms. Here in the US, many states are taking up the issue. In some cases, such action only encourages the desire to take a bite out of what has become a forbidden fruit. In fact, the “latest data indicate that there are now 5.24 billion active social media user identities around the world, with that total increasing by 4.1% over the past 12 months,” according to Global Digital Reports (GDR).
The average daily time spent on social media apps has been logged at two hours and 21 minutes. That’s actually better than it was, as the numbers dropped by two minutes in a year-over-year analysis by GDR. Statistics show that teens use social media the most, and time spent on it decreases with age. Sixty-five-year-olds, for example, spend only about half an hour on these platforms daily.
In terms of global rankings, there are multiple methods to sort them. But from user reports to data tracking, the top five in monthly active users are routinely Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, and TikTok. At the last count, Facebook seemed to have approximately 3.07 billion – yes, that’s b for billion – active monthly users. The others aren’t doing much worse, ranging from just shy of two billion to as many as three billion.
Pew Research Center extrapolated the top-line demographics in the social media war: By age, the youngest users frequent Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and Reddit. By gender, men use social media apps more than women. By race and ethnicity, Hispanics use social media the most, followed by Asians and blacks, with white adults bringing up the rear. Perhaps the most interesting of the demographics is by party:
“Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to report using WhatsApp, Reddit, TikTok, Bluesky, and Threads.
By comparison, Republicans are more likely to say they use X and Truth Social.”
Apps like Bluesky and Truth Social are nowhere near the size of the big boys and appear to be struggling as time goes on. For example, the left-wing app Bluesky, which was launched in the wake of Twitter’s sale to Elon Musk, is still gaining users but at a much slower pace, revealing a loss of momentum. “So Bluesky has gone from adding around 5 million new users per month at peak, to adding 1.6 million per month more recently,” according to Social Media Today. Their registered user base tops out at around 40 million, but only 3.5 million regularly post, according to the statistical website Backlinko. And even that appears to be dwindling.
A report in Forbes Magazine citing digital marketing statistics from Similarweb shows Bluesky numbers “plunging.” The Washington Post echoed Forbes in an opinion article, indicating:
“[T]he platform is hitting a plateau rather than escape velocity. While the number of people with Bluesky accounts keeps inching up, active daily posters currently hover around 650,000, about the same as in September.”
On the right, Truth Social can be viewed as the political polar opposite of Bluesky. Since its inception, Truth Social has garnered 8.5 million downloads. Research from a variety of sources indicates that more men than women prefer the president’s social media app, but the strength of Truth Social lies in its appeal to young people. Statista.com discovered that almost 35% of millennials have “a positive view of Truth Social.” While Truth Social is small, comparatively speaking, its influence in the public square during Donald Trump’s presidency is impossible to calculate.
Despite the recent lawsuit against the two social media behemoths, these platforms – for better or for worse – are here to stay. When successful, they are lucrative and influential. But most of all, these apps are a new way to communicate everything from one’s summer vacation plans to their positions on war and peace. As the power of social media has intensified, it appears that its days in the Wild West of the internet are over. These platforms will have to bear responsibility for their privileged position as major political and cultural communication players of the 21st century.
