Social media and technology companies had an eventful 2023 and beginning of 2024. Together, these companies laid off tens of thousands of employees, a disproportionate number of whom specialized in combating abusive behaviors and harmful experiences on these platforms. This may have created a digital environment where harmful content might surge. For example, hate speech and propaganda on X (formerly Twitter) increased, as did Russian disinformation on Facebook and Instagram. Journalists and watchdog groups also discovered that Facebook and Instagram’s recommendation systems helped to connect and promote vast networks of pedophiles consuming and selling child sexual abuse material. Many of these companies also faced numerous fines from regulatory bodies around the world for failing to take sufficient action to counter disinformation and illegal content or for failing to comply with the growing number of laws enacted to protect users from online harms. Given these developments over the past year, it is worth examining how users’ experiences on these platforms may be changing.
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Thanks to USC Marshall’s Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making, the Psychology of Technology Institute, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation we were able to start our longitudinal panel survey of US adults’ experiences on social media in early 2023. Now, we are able to examine how experiences across these platforms have changed over the course of a tumultuous year in social technology. In today’s report, I compare usage of and experiences on these platforms and services from our initial survey in March-May 2023, and expand upon an earlier report where I examined changes from March-September 2023 to integrate two additional survey waves that ran through February of 2024.
Usage of Online Services
Overall usage of social apps and platforms generally declined a small amount among US adults. As displayed in the table below, three of the 16 largest platforms included in the Neely Social Media Index showed significant declines in recent usage by US adults. Specifically, 5.8% fewer US adults use YouTube in the latest wave of our survey than they did in March of 2023. X (Twitter) and LinkedIn are both now used by 2.9% fewer US adults than were using those services in March 2023. No platform increased its share of US adult users in this time span.
The overall rankings of the top 8 most widely used platforms remained the same. Two platform agnostic modes of social communication -- Email and Text Messaging continued their reigns as the top 2 most widely used services. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Facetime, TikTok, and Snapchat all maintained their relative popularity. WhatsApp showed the biggest climb in the ranked popularity, jumping 3 spots over the year period. Pinterest and Reddit both climbed 1 spot, with X (Twitter), Nextdoor, and LinkedIn falling 2 spots.
We also asked our survey panel about Mastodon and Threads, two newer social media platforms that received some popular press coverage. Fewer than 1% of US adults used Mastodon, and we removed that from the list of platforms included in our survey. Threads, despite becoming the most rapidly downloaded app ever, struggled to retain users. In August 2023, we found that 4.6% of US adults had used the app in the previous 28 days, but that number was cut in half and has remained at just over 2% in each of the survey waves since then. Recently, the number of downloads of Threads has accelerated while downloads of X (Twitter) have continued to decline. In the next wave of the Neely Social Media Index survey we will examine whether these increased downloads of Threads lead to user growth and whether Threads improves at retaining active users over time. We will also check to see whether the declining X (Twitter) downloads is reflected in decreases in monthly active users on that platform.
Next, I report changes in user experiences assessed by 4 main top-level questions that respondents who use each platform were asked in the two survey waves:
- In the past [28 days/4 weeks], have you personally witnessed or experienced something that affected you negatively on [service used]?
- In the past [28 days/4 weeks], have you witnessed or experienced content that you would consider bad for the world on [services used]? (examples could include content that is misleading, hateful, or unnecessarily divisive)?
- In the past [28 days/4 weeks], have you experienced a meaningful connection with others on [services used]? (examples could include exchanging emotional support or bonding over shared experiences)
- In the past [28 days/4 weeks], have you learned something that was useful or that helped you understand something important on [services used]?
Negative Experiences that Personally Affected Users
First, we look at one of the two negative experiences users may have on social media and communication services included in our survey -- whether they personally witnessed or experienced something that affected them negatively in the 28 days prior to completing the survey. As the table below shows, X (Twitter) remained at the top of the list with the highest rate of users reporting negative experiences of any platform in our survey. X (Twitter) did show some marginal improvement in the September-October 2023 data, which coincided with media coverage criticizing the company for not addressing antisemitism or bigotry following the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Anti-Defamation League’s reports showing that hate speech was spiking on the platform. In the months that followed, negative experiences on X returned to their previous high.
On the other end of the spectrum, Pinterest and Facetime remained the platforms with the lowest rates of users reporting negative personal experiences. Neither of these platforms showed a significant decrease over time, but that is more due to the fact that their baseline rates of negative experiences were so low. In fact, fewer than 2.4% of their users reported a negative experience a year ago, and that number has fallen under 1% for both platforms. The 1.3% and 1.9% decreases year over year for Facetime and Pinterest, respectively, marks 61.9 and 79.2% decrease relative to their baseline. Those are huge relative decreases, but the baseline rates were not different from a rate of 0% (i.e., both platforms prevalence estimates are smaller than the margin of error at all time points).
Just 3 of the 16 most widely-used platforms showed a significant year-over-year change in the rate of US adult users reporting negative experiences. Specifically, NextDoor, which had the highest rate of negative personal experiences one year ago, displayed steady declines in each wave of the survey and cumulatively reduced the rate of the negative experiences by 9.6%. Relative to their baseline in March 2023, negative experiences on NextDoor decreased by 36.9%. Facebook (-4.1%) and Email (-3.1%) also showed decreases in negative experiences being reported over this time period. None of the other platforms exhibited changes that exceeded the margin of error.
Both TikTok and Reddit showed steady numerical decreases over the past two waves; if they continue this trend in the next quarter, their reduction of negative personal experiences will also be significant improvements.
Experiences that are Bad for the World
Next, we look at the second of our two negative experiences users may have on social media and communication services -- whether they witnessed or experienced content that they would consider bad for the world. As the table below shows, X (Twitter) remained at the top of the list with the highest rate of users reporting experiences that they consider bad for the world of any platform in our survey. X (Twitter) did show some marginal improvement in the August-September 2023 data, which coincided with media coverage criticizing the company for not addressing anti semitism or bigotry following the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Anti-Defamation League’s reports showing that hate speech was spiking on the platform. In the months that followed, experiences with content users perceived to be bad for the world on X (Twitter) trended upward returning to slightly higher than they were at baseline.
On the other end of the spectrum, Discord, Pinterest, Facetime, and LinkedIn all had rates lower than 2.4% of their users experiencing content on those platforms that they perceived to be bad for the world. LinkedIn did show a 50% increase in this type of experience relative to their baseline, but the overall rate is so low that this 50% increase represents going from 1.6% to 2.4% over one year with a margin of error 8x larger than that difference. Moving in the other direction, Discord showed a 27.6% decrease in experiences their users considered bad for the world, but this represents decreasing from 2.9% to 2.1% over one year with a margin of error 12x larger than the difference between the time points.
Just 1 platform showed a significant change in the percentage of its users reporting experiences that they perceived as bad for the world. A year ago, 27.3% of Facebook users reported experiences that they perceived bad for the world. This number trended downward to 17.3% over the next 5 months, before reversing course and climbing to 20.7%. Year-over-year, experiences that users perceived as bad for the world on Facebook decreased by 6.6%, which represents a 24.2% decline relative to their baseline.
Learning Something Useful or Important
Next, we shift to looking at one of the two positive experiences users may experience on social media that are included in the Neely Social Media Index survey -- whether users learned something useful or important on these services and platforms in the previous 28 days. As seen in the table below, YouTube and Pinterest held onto the top two spots with 51.1 and 42.5% of their respective users reported learning something that was useful or that helped them understand something important in the last 28 days. YouTube mostly held steady over the first 7 months of the longitudinal survey, but then showed a significant increase in the most recent wave. Pinterest, on the other hand, showed slight improvements over time resulting in a significant cumulative improvement over the year.
On the other end of the spectrum, Snapchat and Online Gaming retained their positions as the two services with the lowest rates of users feeling that they learned something useful or important. Neither of those services showed a systematic trend over time; instead, their rates alternated between numerical increases followed by decreases that fell within the margin of error.
There was a tendency for users across many of the platforms to be less likely to say that they learned something useful or important in September and October than they were between March and September. This was most pronounced for TikTok and LinkedIn whose users reporting learning something useful or important dropped 66 and 46%, respectively, from the first two survey waves to the September-October survey wave. Yet, both of these platforms exhibited a rebound effect in the latest survey wave, where users feeling informed on TikTok increased by 57% and on LinkedIn increased by 55% relative to the previous time point. Additionally, there was an overall tendency for users reporting that they felt informed across platforms in the latest survey wave, which could imply exogenous factors like seasonality or specific world events may explain some of the changes above and beyond platform-specific features.
Over the course of the full year, 3 of the 16 most widely-used platforms showed significant increases in the percentage of their users who stated that they recently learned something useful or important. NextDoor showed the greatest improvement over the year, improving 9.8% between March 2023 and February 2024. More specifically, the 21% of NextDoor users reporting learning something useful or important increased 87.5% from their baseline at 11.2%. Pinterest’s steady improvement over the four time periods aggregated together amounted to a 7.8% improvement over the year. Instagram and Text Messaging users feeling that they learned something useful or important also increased by 4.7 and 3.2%, respectively. No other platforms showed a significant year-over-year change.
Meaningful Connections with Others
Next, we look at the other of the two positive user experiences people may have on social media and communication services that we included in our survey -- whether or not they experienced a meaningful connection with others on the service within the past 28 days. As seen in the table below, the two services with the highest rates of their users reporting a meaningful connection with others -- Facetime and Text Messaging -- retained the top two spots, with the majority of users of both services reporting having these experiences. On the other end of the spectrum, Pinterest retains its position as the platform with the lowest rate of users experiencing a meaningful connection with others on the platform.
There was a general numerical tendency for a higher percentage of users of most platforms to report experiencing a meaningful connection in the most recent survey window. This could be due to that survey window including the holidays where the respondents may have been more likely to reach out to friends and families as they sent holiday wishes and planned events together. This explanation seems more likely because the starkest increases in that wave were seen for people asked about Text Messaging and Email, which are general tools that there were not likely many (or any) systematic ways that those services changed over those months.
Over the course of the four survey waves, 3 of the 16 most widely-used platforms or services showed significant changes. Facetime’s 8.6% improvement marks the largest increase, but Instagram’s 4.4% and Text Messaging’s 4.1% improvements followed closely behind. Some of the services with smaller user bases reported larger numerical gains, but due to the smaller number of users the margin of error is larger which raises the magnitude of improvement needed to be confident that the improvement is reliable. Nonetheless, Discord, Snapchat, Pinterest, and WhatsApp did show numerical improvements that we will continue to monitor in subsequent waves of our survey.
How do these platforms rank based on the rate of their users with each of these experiences?
Examining the percent change in experiences on platforms is instructive as it tells us whether user experiences within each of the platforms are improving or worsening over time. The downside of this approach is that it fails to display how these platforms stack up to each other accounting for their changes across these different dimensions. To address this, I created the following heat map that shows the ranking of each service across the four experiences we measured in our survey. To allow for easier comparison of each service’s current ranking to their ranking from one year ago, I included their previous rank in parentheses next to their current ranking. I also color-coded each tile so that better scores (i.e., more positive experiences and fewer negative experiences) are shaded in green and worse scores (i.e., fewer positive experiences and more negative experiences) are shaded in yellow.
There are two main take-home points from these rankings:
- Traditional social media platforms (e.g., X/Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, TikTok) continue to tend to have more bad experiences than the more direct communication services (e.g., Facetime, text messaging) and the more focused / niche social media platforms (e.g., LinkedIn, Pinterest).
- These services are relatively stable in their rankings over the two time points relative to each other. Even when one platform is improving in a user experience over time, they tend not to improve sufficiently to overtake the platforms above them in the rankings. The main exceptions to this are LinkedIn and Instagram, which both dropped several spots on both negative experience dimensions. NextDoor also leapfrogged several platforms in the learning something useful dimension, while Facebook and X (Twitter) both dropped several spots.
Summary
The Neely Social Media Index survey is reflecting other publicly available data sources in showing that the percentage of US adults using some social media and communication services are decreasing, as is the case with X (Twitter), or increasing, as seems to be the case with Reddit. Other platforms, like Facebook and Snapchat, have also trended downwards in the percentage of US adults using them in each subsequent wave. Neither of these downward trends currently exceed the margin of error, but if the trends persist in subsequent waves, they will.
In our first annual report examining changes in user experiences on social platforms and services over 12 months, we see more significant improvements than significant regressions. While we cannot isolate the specific cause(s) of these improvements, it is reasonable to presume that advertiser, legal, and regulatory pressure are part of the story. Specifically, numerous advertisers pulled their advertising campaigns from social platforms where ads were being displayed adjacent to child sexual abuse material or pro-Nazi content, 42 different US states sued Meta for not doing enough to protect children’s well-being, and regulatory bodies in the US, EU, and Australia are seeking large financial penalties for failures to comply with regulations, counter disinformation, and remove illegal content. Some of these improvements may also be due to these companies realizing that promoting better user experiences makes good business sense and tends to improve long-term growth, as internal research from Meta described in Jeff Horwitz’s Broken Code demonstrated and as our Senior Advisor and Integrity Institute fellow (me, Matt Motyl) argued in Tech Policy Press.
In subsequent reports, we will examine other changes over time, like how the types of experiences users are having are changing over time, whether individuals with more negative experiences and fewer positive experiences are more likely to cut back on using particular platforms, and how these results might change across different demographic and social categories. As always, I welcome all questions and suggestions.
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