The most popular social networks in the world, and who owns them
Currently, more than 4.5 billion people worldwide use some form of social media – about 57% of the global population.
However, despite the wide and diverse audience of social media, only a handful of companies control most of the world's most popular social media platforms. Meta, the tech giant formerly known as Facebook, has four of the five most widely used platforms.
The infographic in this article highlights the world's largest social network, measured by Monthly Active Users (MAU).
Note: We will alternate between terms such as "Social Network" and "Social Platform" to refer to various messaging, video, and image sharing platforms with built-in social attributes.
Top social platforms ranked by monthly active users
To measure the MAU of each platform, we mined a variety of sources, including recent corporate SEC filings and quarterly earnings reports.
The majority of Meta's user base comes from its most popular platform, Facebook – the social media giant currently has about 2.9 billion MAU worldwide.
Where are Facebook users located in the world? The platform's largest user base is from India, with an audience of nearly 350 million. Its second largest user base is the United States with 193.9 million users, while Indonesia ranks third with 142.5 million users.
But Facebook isn't the only social giant in the Meta platform network. WhatsApp has about 2 billion MAU, making it the second largest platform for Meta and the third largest social network overall.
Like Facebook, a large number of WhatsApp users are located in India, with about 390 million users. Brazil also has a large percentage of WhatsApp users, with an audience of 108 million.
Billion User Club
Meta currently dominates the social networking space, with a total of 7.5 billion MAU across all four platforms. However, MAU on all platforms of several other companies also reached the 1 billion mark:
After Meta, Tencent ranked second with its influence on three platforms: WeChat, QQ and QQ Space. Of the three, WeChat is currently the most popular. On average, WeChat users send about 45 billion messages a day.
In third place is Alphabet, thanks to one of its platforms, YouTube. Founded in 2005, this video streaming platform currently has more than 50 million content creators who share approximately 500 hours of video content per minute.
Alphabet is followed by ByteDance, whose two platforms, Douyin and its international counterpart TikTok, have a total of 1.6 billion monthly active users. While these applications have many similarities, they operate as completely separate entities with different registrations, content policies, and regulations.
Global social networks? Not always
While social media networks often cross borders, it's worth noting that the online space isn't completely free from the limitations and regulations of our physical world.
Since 2009, Facebook has been banned in China for not following censorship rules. Facebook was also blocked around the same time in Iran and Syria, and has since been occasionally blocked.
In 2020, the Trump administration tried to issue a similar ban on TikTok, but the order was blocked by a federal judge and eventually revoked by the Biden administration a year later.
Despite the various bans and barriers, it's clear that social media platforms have infiltrated the lives (and on-screens) of users across the globe. As the number of internet visits around the world continues to grow, so will the number of social media users.