ROME – The Italian social media market is saturated. X, Elon Musk’s X platform, is collapsing. Instagram is showing signs of fatigue, while TikTok remains afloat thanks to the time users spend online. It is the photograph taken from the analysis of digital expert Vincenzo Cosenza, processed with data from the Audicom-Audiweb detection system. An evolving scenario, which could change in the coming months with the entry of artificial intelligence.
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“There is an unprecedented contraction in the use of some social media that begins in 2024 and continues in the first months of 2025,” explains the expert. Specifically, between January 2024 and September 2025 there was a loss of 0.16% of overall users and a rebalancing of flows between platforms. The clearest collapse is that of X, which now ranks seventh in the ranking of the most used social networks in Italy. A decline of 12.8% between 2023 and 2024. Even more dramatic if you look at the data for the last months of 2025, where it totaled -27.6%: equal, in short, to a loss of 4.4 million users. The time spent on the platform also decreased, decreasing by 30%.
But what are the platforms most used by Italians? With an audience of 37.1 million people – up 0.5% on 2023, but down 1% if the first nine months of 2024 and 2025 are compared – the video sharing social network Youtube takes pole position in the ranking. While the other two steps on the podium go, in order of use, to the two platforms, owned by Meta, Facebook and Instagram. The first remains the social network where Italians spend the most time, on average 13 hours and 29 minutes per month per person.
TikTok resists. Linkedin, in continuous decline, does not engage users
TikTok then comes in fourth place. The platform has an audience of 22.4 million users, growing from 2023 to 2024, but declining in the last nine months by 0.6%. And from January to September of 2024 and 2025, the time spent by users grew by 27%. Telegram, however, rises to fifth place, with 16.5 million users. Also in this case there is a growth of 1.2% in 2023, but a decline of 1.5% in recent months. A continuous worsening is that recorded by Linkedin, the media dedicated to work which records “a continuous decline, first of 13% and now of 7.7%”, with a major problem of user involvement, who spend only 15 minutes online a month.
What is expected from AI
“We will see what will happen in the coming months when social networks undergo a transformation due to the massive entry of content produced with artificial intelligence and, in some cases, also of chatbots that should stimulate engagement”, is the conclusion reached by Vincenzo Cosenza. Innovations that Meta is already working on, giving users the ability to create and communicate with chatbots. X is, however, integrating Grok among its functions, while ByteDance, a TikTok company, is investing significant resources in the development of generative models.
