How the Middle East uses Facebook and Twitter: key stats
This is an extract from my new report “State of Social Media, Middle East: 2018,” which was published earlier this year. Read the Executive Summary and the section on Market Context.
Facebook’s Market Dominance
Facebook Marketplace rolled out to Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco in the first part of the year. The move meant the service was available in Arabic for the first time and brought the number of countries using Marketplace to 51.
Around 24 million people use Facebook every day in Egypt, and nearly 37 million people in the country access the network via mobile each month.
Egypt remains the biggest national market for Facebook in the region.
Facebook has 164 million active monthly users in the Arab world. This is up from 56 million Facebook users just five years earlier.
Twitter released its 13th biannual Transparency Report in December 2018. The report, covering topics such as removal requests, contains data from the first six months of 2018.
- Mashable identified findings showing that around 87% of legal demands to remove content “came from just two countries: Russia and Turkey.”
- Overall, 38 different countries made such requests, related to 27,811 Twitter accounts. 13,843 of these requests were in Turkey.
“Turkey continued to submit the most requests,” Twitter wrote, “accounting for approximately 73% of the overall worldwide total.”
Separately, research by Marc Owen Jones (Exeter University) and Alexei Abrahams (Princeton) found that:
“Less than 30% of Twitter users post original content, and among these, the top 2% (0.6% overall) are retweeted so much more than anyone else that they drive roughly 75 % of the conversation.”
Read more by downloading the full study today from the University of Oregon Scholars’ Bank, or view it online via Scribd, SlideShare, ResearchGate and Academia.Edu.
