Some of the Biggest Economies Aren't a Big User Of Social Media (axios.com)

From a report: Only 37 percent of Germans use social media, according to a new Pew survey, a surprising figure given the fact that Germany is the world's fourth-largest economy by GDP, according to the World Economic Forum. Similar patterns follow for Japan, France and Italy, ranked 3rd, 6th and 8th in largest economy by GDP.

Comments

Speaking of CIA project...

[DrYak]

Social media - also known as mind hive CIA project

Speaking of which : notice how nearly all cited countries - Germany, France and Italy - are in Europe, and we European tend to be really serious about our privacy.
And Japan is similarly concerned with privacy and not intruding onto other people.

And that not only classical social networks (like Facebook).
That's also the case with chat systems. WhatsApp seems to be not as popular there are elsewhere in the world. You could find actually lots of german who prefere/have switched to other systems (basically : systems with more green checks on FSF's list)

Privacy

[DrYak]

does not necessarily lead to productivity.

Though, as mentionned by TFA (sorry, I read it, here I'll turn in my /. member card) they are even more obsessed with their privacy, as a significant part of Europe is.

The other country are also European (Italy, France) or similarly obsessed with privacy and averse to intrusion (Japan).

Seems that the US is actually the anomaly, having a high GDP *but* happily providing all their personal information to be abused by marketeers/advertiser, by three-letter agencies, and by pirates leaking databases and personal photo collections.

Re:Germany has a long history of data privacy conc

[Cro Magnon]

Twitter has an entirely different problem - the German language tend to be far more complicated than English. What fits into 140 characters in English can easily reach 200 characters in German, and even then be very imprecise. Most Germans tend to use it as a glorified news feed, less as something interactive.

Good point. All it takes is a few of those long German words, and they're already over the 140 limit.

This isn't surprising at all

[istartedi]

What we call "social media" is really young, and a huge recession took place during that time. You could snap your fingers, make FaceBook disappear, and the economy at large would not really feel it. Just 10 years ago, nobody was using this crap and things were just fine.