Facebook has been even more unavoidable than usual in recent weeks.
Whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former employee of the social media company, was interviewed on “60 Minutes” and appeared before a Senate committee, accusing Facebook of putting profits over safety and backing those accusations with thousands of pages of internal research documents.
On Oct. 4, Facebook’s collection of apps, including not only Facebook but also Instagram and Whats App, went down for about six hours. The company said the outage was caused by a cascade of errors.
Then, this week, the family of TV news reporter Alison Parker, who was killed by a former co-worker while reporting for a television station in Virginia in August 2015, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against Facebook, saying the corporation has not taken down footage of Parker’s murder.
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How big of a role does Facebook and other social media outlets play in society? This week’s data dump looks at some numbers.
5%
The number of American adults who used at least one social media platform in 2005 according to Pew Research Center.
72%
The number of American adults who used at least one social media platform in 2021 according to the center.
81%
The percentage of American adults who have used YouTube as of February 2021, according to the center.
95%
The percentage of Americans between the ages of 18-29 who have used YouTube, according to the center.
69%
The percentage of Americans who use Facebook, according to the center.
490 million
The number of users that social media platform gained in 2020, according to data collected by Hootsuite.
15.5 million
The number of users social media platforms gained every second in 2020, according to the Hootsuite data.
2 hours and 25 minutes
The amount of time the average user worldwide spends on social media, according to the Hootsuite data.
270 billion
The number of monthly Facebook users, according to the Hootsuite data.