Many of us cannot imagine our lives without the Internet — but the technology is still young. Only 63% of the world’s population was online in 2023.

The Internet provides an almost endless list of services: it allows us to communicate and collaborate worldwide, send money internationally (including remittances), learn and educate others, form cross-border social connections, share news, and many others.

On this page, you can find all our data, visualizations, and writing relating to the Internet.

Research & Writing

The Internet's history has just begun

The Internet has already changed the world, but the big changes it will bring still lie ahead.

Max Roser

The rise of social media

Social media sites are used by more than two-thirds of Internet users. How has social media grown over time?

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina

Are Facebook and other social media platforms bad for our well-being?

What does the research tell us about the causal impact of social media use on our well-being?

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina

Interactive Charts on the Internet

Cite this work

Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this topic page, please also cite the underlying data sources. This topic page can be cited as:

Hannah Ritchie, Edouard Mathieu, Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2023) - “Internet” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/internet' [Online Resource]

BibTeX citation

@article{owid-internet,
    author = {Hannah Ritchie and Edouard Mathieu and Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina},
    title = {Internet},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2023},
    note = {https://ourworldindata.org/internet}
}

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