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All’s a-twitter. Having been retweeted more than 3.3 million times—more than any other tweet—Ellen DeGeneres’ Oscar selfie was designated “The Golden Tweet” by Twitter’s chief communications officer in his year-end roundup of the social media platform’s 2014 highlights. The most popular hashtags on Twitter this year included #BringBackOurGirls, in response to the mass kidnapping of young females in Nigeria, and #BlackLivesMatter, regarding the Ferguson protests. The deaths of Maya Angelou, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Williams were also the subject of a significant number of tweets in 2014.
Are we less social? Social media may have peaked in the United States, a survey by the British telecom regulator Ofcom shows. Fifty-four percent of the 1,000 U.S. adults who participated in the survey reported visiting a social network at least once a week, compared to the 56% who reported having done so in 2013. That’s hardly enough to warrant sounding the U.S. social media death knell, however, especially when you consider that—according the analytics company comScore—the total U.S. Internet population increased 10.6% from 225.3 million to 249.4 million last year. The decline in weekly social media use among the British from 2013 to 2014 was much more significant, according to Ofcom; the number of UK residents making weekly network visits dropped from 65% to 56% over that period. For what it’s worth, 89% of the team here at Socially Aware is skeptical.