Recent research by VPNOverview has highlighted how American users are increasingly intent on deleting Instagram from their smartphones, more than any other app. A finding that is part of the debate about how these apps affect younger users.
As we have mentioned many times before, social media is in a phase of great change. A new situation is now taking shape that platforms must interpret well, knowing full well that on the other side users are changing their attitudes.
This is how we can present the attitude of American users who, according to recent research by VPNOverview, turn to search engines requesting how to delete or deactivate a particular application from their smartphones.
The research tracked this trend for 6 months, considering in this time frame how many times Americans were typing these types of requests. Well, Instagram is the one that totaled the most searches, or requests, ever among all 30 monitored apps: well over 900 thousand.
In second place is another Meta app, Facebook, ce totaled half of the search engine queries with over 385 thousand. This was followed by Snapchat, widely used in the U.S. especially among younger people, with over 217 thousand requests. Surprisingly, given all the talk in recent months, Twitter with over 92 thousand requests and then Telegram with over 24 thousand.
You may be wondering, rightly so, about TikTok. ByteDance’s app, despite the great debate that now sees it at the center of a process of deletion from government smartphones in Europe and other states, got “just” 14 thousand requests.
A very interesting figure this from Instagram, if we consider that the app Meta is betting the most on was the second most downloaded app in 2022 with over half a billion downloads, in the U.S., second only to TikTok.
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But it is a figure that also fits into the debate about the consequences that prolonged and extensive use of apps like these can cause especially on younger users.
You may recall that a little over a year ago the WSJ published a secret Meta report noting the negative effects of Instagram especially on younger users, a finding that opened the debate that just these days is reopening in a clear way.
And, still remaining in the U.S., last year Pew Research noted that 54 percent of teenage users believed that a life without social media was impossible, while it was possible for 46 percent of them. An opinion, as can be seen, that divides the younger audience in half.
In Italy, from this point of view, we can rely on recent data from a research study by Telefono Azzurro, in collaboration with Doxa Kids. The research found that almost a third of the young people surveyed, 27 percent of them, say they would feel anxious or agitated without the use of social media (the figure rises to 29 percent among young users aged 15-18 and is 26 percent from 12-14); while 22 percent even respond that they would feel lost.