Kenya tops the world ranking of time spent on social media by its citizens. This was revealed by the ‘Digital Report’ research by Visual Capitalist, a site specialising in this kind of study.
Kenyans are more social than anyone else on the globe, thanks above all to Tik Tok and X: more than the Filipinos, who led the ranking last year, and have relegated to fourth place, more than South Africans who are second, putting the African continent at the top of Internet surfers, and Brazil, third. Italy, fourth of the European nations after Bulgaria, Portugal and Romania, is only 20th.
According to the research, Kenyans spend an average of 3 hours and 43 minutes on social media per day. The average time is spent only on social media platforms, excluding any form of internet browsing. This is one hour and 13 minutes more than the average time global internet users spend on social media, which is about 5 billion. The data looked at people between the ages of 16 and 64.
The result (which we would not dare to call a ‘success’, but a phenomenon that should certainly be better understood) is due to the fact that by now about 41% of Kenyans can easily access the internet, and in general all of Africa has similar percentages and an enthusiastic approach to new tools, as well as (a fundamental fact) the fact that these are very young countries, with a majority of users under the age of 35, the so-called ‘Generation Z’, which in the case of Kenya organised the anti-government protests on social networks that resulted in street demonstrations that forced the government to cancel the financial bill last June. Ghana and Egypt, for example, also feature in the top twenty countries, at positions 13 and 14.
Remarkably, it is women who spend the most time on social media, about 16 minutes more.
As mentioned, among all social media platforms, the most time is spent on TikTok. In fact, the popular video sharing platform is the platform with the highest average time spent per user. YouTube, on the other hand, takes the lion's share of the total time spent on social media, due to the length of the videos.
And the black jersey, or in this case least addicted?
It is Japan, once the standard-bearer for technological innovations, the country with the least time spent on social media, with an average of just 1 hour 53 minutes per day.