Social media has reached more than half (63.9%) of the world’s population since it got started in 1996. Social network platforms grew from 970 million users in 2010 to 5.41 billion in July 2025. The average social media user engages with between six and seven platforms. The average person spends two hours 21 minutes on social media per day.
All this time on social media shapes people’s perceptions, influences emotions and fuels anxieties, but its impact on social stress remains difficult to measure. Herkulaas MvE Combrink is a specialist in computational infodemiology, a field which studies the spread of information in digital spaces, at high volumes and with high degrees of uncertainty. The discipline draws on artificial intelligence, public health, and natural language processing. He unpacks his research and explains the Social Stress Indicator, a computational tool he devised for quantifying social stress in real time. It can provide an early warning of how people are feeling about what they are seeing online.
