Facebook is one of the world's best-known social media platforms and also has a large audience on the European continent. Europe's introduction of new privacy rules, collectively known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), has lead to complaints and concerns on the business model of the Silicon Valley giant. In October 2018, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) was considering opening a formal investigation into Facebook due to a security bug which allowed hackers to access information on 50 million accounts.

According to numbers from NapoleonCat.com, relatively many Europeans use Facebook. In Sweden, over 60 percent of the population use Facebook, whilst only 38.6 percent use the social media platform in Germany. Facebook was the most popular, however, in Malta, where eight out of ten citizens use it.

Facebook also owns the popular photo-sharing app Instagram, which also has many users in the EU-28, Norway, Switzerland, Russia and Turkey. Whilst nearly 59 percent of the UK population used Facebook, nearly 35 percent of people in the United Kingdom used Instagram. For the same infographic on Instagram, click here.