The most HATED social media sites around the world

If you’re fed up with Facebook but can’t get enough of TikTok, you’re not alone.  

New research has revealed the least and most loved social media apps around the world.

Facebook came in as the most hated social media app, ranking as the lowest-rated site in 39 countries. 

Not far behind was microblogging platform Reddit, ranked as the worst-rated app in 30 countries including the UK. 

However, it was TikTok that came out on top as the UK and the world’s most beloved app – ranked top in 30 countries overall. 

The most hated social media apps 

For the research, email tracking service Mailsuite compared the Google Play Store reviews for 1,500 apps.

With Facebook the least loved overall, the list may come as a disappointment to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, which are all owned by the social media giant, made it into the top five most-hated sites.

Facebook appeared to be especially reviled in South America where only four countries listed anything other than Facebook as their least favourite.

Zuckerberg’s first social media site was also disliked across large parts of Africa and Asia, hitting the bottom of the tables in India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Morocco.

Meta only fared slightly better with their other social media sites, Instagram and Threads, which were both least popular in four countries.

Threads, designed as an alternative to Twitter, was launched to huge fanfare in the summer of 2023.

Despite an early spike in downloads, enthusiasm for the so-called ‘Twitter killer’ soon waned.

However, Threads is now once again closing the gap with its rival, seeing triple the daily downloads of X (Twitter) on iOS and double on the Google Play Store.

X was ranked as the least popular in 10 countries around the world, and was third overall on the most-hated list. 

Since Elon Musk’s takeover of the app in October 2022 the social media site has faced a stream of controversy.

Notably, Musk has faced strong criticism for his cutbacks to moderation and lax attitudes towards hate speech which scared many advertisers off the platform.

The UK, however, follows most of Europe in selecting Reddit as its most hated social media site.

In all, 30 countries gave Reddit the lowest rating of any social media site including Germany, France, Spain, and Sweden.

The social media site founded in 2005 has also recently undergone a series of large changes after going public on the  stock market.

The company has now reached deals to include more advertising and block search engines like Google from accessing its content unless they pay for the data.

The most loved social media apps  

However, not all social media apps inspire such vitriol and many are beloved by their users.

In particular, TikTok, the short form video sharing platform, appears to be the most well-loved – ranking top in 30 countries around the world.

Founded in 2016 by Chinese company ByteDance, the app has rapidly become one of the most popular social media platforms in the world and is especially preferred by younger generations.

However, TikTok has faced increasing scrutiny for its supposed security vulnerabilities and links to its Chinese-owned parent companies.

This has culminated in some senators mounting an effort to ban the app in the US.

It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that it was newcomer BeReal which claimed the top spot in the US rather than TikTok.

The French social media site, launched in 2020, prompts users to take an unfiltered photo every day via the app’s camera, which snaps a selfie and a photo using the rear camera simultaneously.

TikTok was the most popular app globally every year between 2018 and 2022 but was overtaken by Instagram in 2023.

That year TikTok was downloaded 733 million times compared with 767 million times for Instagram.

This sudden return to form was largely attributed to the introduction of Instagram Reels – a feature mimicking TikTok’s short video format.

However, even that was not enough to pull Instagram up the tables; Mailsuite’s research found that the Meta-owned photo-sharing app came top in only nine countries.

Threads and Facebook also performed a bit better, coming out on top in 15 and 12 countries, respectively.

A surprising entrant into the top five most loved apps was the little-known TikTok clone Likee.

This video-sharing app was the top-rated app in the Google Play Store of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Latvia, and Moldova.

However, the app has faced extreme scrutiny for its lax approach to child safety, privacy, and explicit content with one expert calling it a ‘paedophile’s paradise’.

The app automatically displays the user’s location with each post, and the search functionality allows users to filter the results by gender.

Users are also unable to set their profiles to private or restrict who can send them messages.

A review of the app’s safety by VPNoverview found that the site heavily featured graphic content despite being listed as 12+ on the Google Play Store.

It’s interesting to note that several famous apps were in both the most-hated and most-loved lists – namely, Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

This suggests they are particularly polarizing for social media users, while the likes of TikTok (only in the most-loved list) are more universally adored.