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Social commerce is gaining momentum in the UK—with sales set to double by 2028—as major brands join TikTok and as more people shop on social platforms.

Mercado Libre, Amazon, and Meituan are ecommerce companies; Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest are social media companies; and Kuaishou is essentially both. Roku and Spotify will be the only outliers on the list of fast growers in 2025. It is worth noting, however, that we do not yet have a projection for worldwide Netflix ad revenues, which would likely rank highly in the above chart.

Total media time is on a steady slide in the UK. By 2026, it will drop to below 10 hours per day, the lowest level in a decade. Digital media—particularly digital and social video—is picking up some of the slack, but it won’t halt the decline.

That enormous figure is slightly down from Facebook’s 2020 peak (46.6%) but still leaves it well in front of sister platform Instagram (31.4% penetration). TikTok will have 1 billion users this year for the first time, but it will still be less than half the size of Facebook.

The company admitted to scraping public posts across Facebook and Instagram to train its AI models and personalize ads. Using facial recognition data for the sole purpose of ID authentication could fly with some consumers, but might upset others who have lost trust in the brand. Meta’s facial-recognition testing is notably absent in the UK and the EU, where data privacy laws are stricter.

Fortunately for Meta, Instagram is picking up some of the slack. While Facebook is losing ground among younger users, Instagram has captured some of those migrating away. Among these cohorts, Instagram faces intense competition from Snapchat and particularly TikTok. Keeping everyone in its ecosystem will be a challenge, but growth in the number of Instagram users points to some success.

Symbiotic benefits: In addition to being a threat to Meta’s Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram users, online scams pose a financial risk to banks. Users can be tricked into sending money to bad actors through a variety of methods. Authorized push payment (APP) fraud among UK consumers totaled about £460 million ($572 million) in 2023, per Mastercard.

The news: Meta has been scraping all public data from Facebook and Instagram users in Australia since 2007. This applies to photos and texts in all public posts, including photos of children posted by their parents. Users in Australia—and in the US—don’t have an opt-out option for data scraping, which has been provided to users in the EU and the UK.