How many people use social media worldwide?

How to get close to this number

Take internet users and apply a near-total share. The explanation gives it: ninety-four percent of everyone who uses the internet at all also uses social media. So this figure is essentially the internet user count minus a small remainder, which makes it derivable from the companion question rather than a separate fact.

That near-identity is the interesting finding. For the overwhelming majority of people, being online and being on social media are the same thing — the internet is not a place they visit and then optionally join a network within; the network is what they came for. That has been true for a decade and it reshapes what "internet access" means as a policy goal.

The multi-platform figure is the other structural detail: the average user has accounts on nearly seven platforms. Platform user counts therefore cannot be added together, because the same people appear in all of them, and any sum of reported user numbers across services massively overcounts the underlying population.