Discussion platform Reddit is the fastest-growing social media platform in the UK, surpassing X in popularity, regulatory body Ofcom has revealed.
Reddit reached 22.9m (48 per cent) of adults in the UK in May 2024, compared with 22.1 million on X.
The platform, where users post on discussion threads within topic-based communities, was likely boosted by updates to Google’s search engine this year.
“Google’s latest algorithm update in the first half of 2024 gave Reddit a big boost in organic search traffic. I think that has probably contributed a lot,” Farhad Divecha, managing director of UK-based digital marketing agency AccuraCast, told The Guardian.
“Being able to curate your own experience is what makes Reddit the best social media site on the internet,” a Reddit user shared to the platform following the news.
Reddit is now above LinkedIn and X into fifth place on the table of UK social media platforms, which is topped by YouTube after it overtook Facebook, reaching more than 44 million adults.
Ofcom also speculated that the change may have been caused by alterations to how third-party apps accessed its content, forcing users of those apps to switch to the Reddit site.
It follows a record number of X users shutting down their accounts on 6 November after Donald Trump was re-elected as US President the day before. This data came from internet traffic analyser Similarweb, which announced that 115,000 US-based web visitors deactivated their X accounts after Election Day.
X has been criticised over content moderation standards since its takeover by Elon Musk in 2022 but it has also faced competition since July 2023 from Threads, a rival to X launched by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
Social media platform Bluesky also saw over a million new users since the US election, as users sought to escape X’s landscape.
But some have warned brands not to jump on the Bluesky bandwagon just yet. Amaury Treguer, co-founder of Bread Agency, told B&T that while users have been growing on Bluesky, he would not advise brands to jump on the platform right away.
“Bluesky is an interesting one, especially if you are in the US or European markets. But I don’t know if people in Australia will bother when they are not already familiar or using X or Threads that much. I don’t think brands will be jumping on this straight away and I would definitely advise them not to do it straight away. It’s just another platform that you need to keep up,” he said.
The Ofcom figures also revealed that four out of 10 UK adults say they have encountered misinformation or deepfakes, with the majority of those cases occurring online.
The misinformation survey, based on a poll of more than 4,000 UK adults, also found that three in 10 adults believe there is a single group of people who control the world together, with the same number believing there is “significant evidence” of electoral fraud in the UK.
