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For: The opinion Updated Dec 24, 2022, 23:30 pm EST
The Social networks are the most popular web platforms of the last decade and its constant use has led to certain addiction for some peoplenow a study suggests that this could be poverty related.
According to research conducted by an international team, adolescents from low-income backgrounds are more likely to report addictive use of social networks.
As reported by McGill University, where one of the authors comes from, the study found a connection between economic inequality and problematic use of social media platforms and instant messaging applications.
The researchers’ authors identified the problematic use of social networks in the adolescents who reported six or more addiction-like behaviors.
The behaviors found by the researchers are: feeling bad when not using social mediatrying to spend less time using them, but without success, and using social networks to escape negative feelings.
The results -based on more than 179,000 schoolchildren from 40 countries- found that the addiction situation is worse in schools where differences in wealth between classmates are greater.
Users of social networks in the world
The most recent analysis by the Kepios agency shows that in October 2022 there were 4.74 billion social media users worldwidewhich is equivalent to 59.3% of the world population.
The number of social media users has continued to grow in the last 12 months, with 190 million new users since last year around this time.
This equates to a annualized growth of 4.2%, at an average rate of 6 new users every second. The latest figures indicate that more than 9 out of 10 Internet users use social networks each month.
Data from the Global Digital Overview report reveals that the typical social media user actively uses or visits an average of 7.2 different social platforms each month, spending an average of about 2.5 hours a day using social media.
Assuming that people sleep between 7 and 8 hours a day, these latest figures suggest that people spend about 15% of their waking life using social media.
Total, the world spends more than 10 billion hours a day using social platformswhich is equivalent to almost 1.2 million years of human existence.
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