As technology expands and the internet becomes more apparent and dependable for almost everyone, social media continues to rise and take over society as a whole, bringing many people all over the world into its growing web.
According to the website, Statista, as of February 2025, there were 5.56 billion internet users worldwide, amounting to the percentage of 67.9 of the global population. Of this total, 5.24 billion of those users also use social media.
YouTube, being one of the most popular social media apps/platforms in the world, has a wide range of audiences and an even wider range of videos, streams, and shorts. In 2025, from Globalmediainsight.com, YouTube has more than 2.70 billion users, being one of the largest social media platforms, only being beaten out by Facebook, which has 3.06 billion users. YouTube, like many of other social media platforms, has its negatives such as:
*Exposure to inappropriate content
*Screentime addictions
*Misinformation and fake news
*Mental health impact
*Ad overload and monetization issues
*Copyright infringement
and even more. But YouTube has many positives to it as well such as online videographic tutorials, a leisure space to relax, cooking videos, gaming content, and the list goes on.
X, formally known by everyone as Twitter, is WAY less popular than YouTube for sure, but still has quite a lot of daily users. According to Demandsage website, Twitter(X) has approximately 245 million daily active users as of February 2025. Twitter can be a very toxic platform, from misinformation, cyberbullying, just toxicity in general. Tons of trolling and harassment can usually be found on this platform. But it’s not all negatives about Twitter, there are obviously a few positives. Finding the out news (only if it’s real news), following and retweeting popular users and content creators, and more.
Facebook is supposedly the most popular social media platform on the internet, being more popular than YouTube and Twitter with more than 3 million monthly active users. Facebook has many features, including event management, creating group chats, muting conversations, animated clips and gifs, and more. There are many ways to connect with people via Facebook. Facebook comes with its negatives of course. Such as a lot of psychological and philosophical effects that include feeling jealousy, stress, and a lack of attention. People also post nonsense as one does when they want to troll, Facebook doesn’t escape the continuous “fake news” format, and it can create an addiction.
Instagram is coming up on its 14th anniversary since releasing on October 6 in 2010. It continues to evolve and innovate, introducing new features and refining its algorithms. With 2.4 billion active Instagram users, the user base represents approximately 1/4th of the world’s active internet users each month. Instagram has many benefits to its raging algorithm. Benefits such as:
*Business
*Instagram Reels
*Photos and Hashtags
*Livestream videos
*Analytics
*Engagement
*Brand Awareness
and a lot more. Instagram is definitely an application that is more popular, but it comes with a lot of bad things. Things such as identity theft, cyberbullying, the comment section of Instagram, online scams, and many negative mental health impacts can be caused by an addiction to Instagram or any social media platform.
TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms in the modern age. From Seo.ai, TikTok has 1,925 billion users, with 170 million monthly active users in the United States, with entertainment being one of the apps most popular categories. TikTok managed to survive a ban from the United States and continues to bring entertainment value to many people over the world and is certainly not declining in popularity. Some positive effects of TikTok are:
*Viral Trends
*Endless Influencers
*Creative Contents
*Diverse Contents
*Viral Potential
And many more influences on society, both positive, and negative. Some negative effects that TikTok sets on society are things such as doom scrolling, controversies, bullying, addiction, and possible inappropriate content.
Social media and its content is definitely not going anywhere anytime soon as it is way too popular and fun to mess around. As society grows, so does social media and it’ll continue to grow forever. While it can be very good to just have fun, everyone needs to be careful of what they see on social media and that they shouldn’t listen to social media for news and do research on certain topics.
