Quick links: Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Telegram | Threads | TikTok | WhatsApp | 𝕏 | YouTube

In 2026 the use of social media channels for communications has become ubiquitous. Two decades after the emergence of social media no president, no prime minister, no government or foreign ministry can afford not to be active on at least one or more social media channels.media no president, no prime minister, no government or foreign ministry can afford not to be active on at least one or more social media channels.

Facebook and X are the most popular digital diplomacy networks among leaders: the heads of state and government in 161 countries have personal accounts on both platforms, representing 83% of all 193 UN member states. Eighty percent of world leaders have set up personal accounts on Instagram.

Slightly over half of all the heads of state and government of the 193 UN member states maintain personal profiles on YouTube, LinkedIn and even TikTok.

Newer additions to the digital diplomacy toolbox, Bluesky, Telegram, and WhatsApp have been adopted so far by the leaders and governments in around 50 countries, representing roughly a quarter of all UN member states. The niche networks such as Mastodon and Snapchat are only used by a handful of leaders.

Adoption of X is global with only four countries where the governments do not have accounts, namely Laos, North Korea, São Tomé and Príncipe and Turkmenistan. Six countries don’t have a Facebook presence, namely Afghanistan, Eritrea, Laos, Nicaragua, North Korea, and Turkmenistan.

Despite its radical rebrand from Twitter to X, Elon Musk’s social network is still the channel for real-time #DigitalDiplomacy. The 1,179 accounts listed in the digital atlas have a combined following of 818 million and a median of more than 44,000 followers per account.

However, world leaders have their biggest audiences on Meta’s channels namely Facebook with a median of 80,000 followers, Instagram with 29,000 followers and WhatsApp with 72,000 followers on average. The 451 channels on YouTube have a median of only 5,460 subscribers and it is even less for LinkedIn with only 3,585 followers on the personal profiles of leaders and their institutional pages.

Adoption of governmental social media communication is pervasive in Europe and in South America where all governments have accounts on Facebook, Instagram and X. European leaders also lead the adoption of LinkedIn and YouTube while all South American leaders have a presence on TikTok and all but one have embraced Threads. Despite initial security fears 39 out of the 45 European countries have set up accounts on TikTok, the vertical video network.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the most followed world leader with 390 million followers combined on his personal and the institutional @PMOIndia accounts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, X and YouTube combined. And he isn’t even on Telegram, Threads nor TikTok.

US President Donald Trump ranks second with a combined following of 264 million on his personal account and the institutional @POTUS accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube. He is neither on LinkedIn, Telegram, Threads, nor WhatsApp preferring his personal social network Truth Social.

Pope Leo XIV is the third most followed leader with 62 million followers combined on his nine papal language accounts on X and the new @Pontifex Instagram account.

While the leaders of the most populous countries obviously rank prominently in the Top10 ranking, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele is an outlier. The self-proclaimed “Philosopher King” of a country with a population of only 6.3 million has established himself as the Latin American digital leader clocking up 47 million followers across his channels.

The only woman among the 10 most followed world leaders is Droupadi Murmu, the President of India. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Brazilian President Lula da Silva, French President Emmanuel Macron, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy complete the Top 10 list of the most followed world leaders on social media.

While all G7 leaders have active personal social media channels, it is noteworthy that only two of the G20 leaders do not have a personal presence on social media, namely Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.

Quick links: Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Telegram | Threads | TikTok | WhatsApp | 𝕏 | YouTube

Bluesky, the Brussels diplomatic network

Bluesky is the smallest network in this study by a wide margin. The 118 accounts of world leaders, governments and foreign ministries, up from 110 a year ago, count 1,201,607 followers between them, 0.15% of the audience the same institutions command on X, with a median of only 1,099 followers per account. Half of all accounts have fewer than a thousand followers. Yet the median account grew 22% over the past year.

It is also, overwhelmingly, a European network. Europe accounts for 72 of the 118 accounts and just over half of all followers, and the European Union’s own institutions alone hold 27% of Bluesky’s entire leader audience: Ursula von der Leyen (123,996 followers, +21%), the European Commission (95,469), High Representative Kaja Kallas (69,702, +27%), European Council President António Costa (18,339) and the Council itself (9,691). Nowhere else in this study does Brussels loom so large.

Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the most followed leader with 295,611 followers, a quarter of the network’s entire audience, though his account barely moved over the year (+1%). Canada’s Mark Carney follows with 197,773 (+22%) and von der Leyen with 123,996. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk (73,524), Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum (21,165), António Costa, the Netherlands’ Rob Jetten (17,970 combined on his personal and institutional accounts), Austria’s President Alexander Van der Bellen (15,607), Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who nearly doubled his following to 10,604, and Ireland’s presidency (10,440) complete the Top 10. Between them, the three largest accounts hold half of everything on the platform.

Bluesky’s distinctive contribution to digital diplomacy is not its size but its approach to identity. Instead of a purchased checkmark, the platform lets an institution prove who it is by using its own web domain as its handle, and governments have taken to it: Ursula von der Leyen posts as @vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu, the Commission as @ec.europa.eu, Austria’s President as @bundespraesident.at, Ireland’s as @president.ie, the German Foreign Office as @diplo.de and its minister as @aussenminister.diplo.de, Finland’s government as @valtioneuvosto.fi and Norway’s foreign ministry as @mfa.norway.no. Of the 118 accounts, 31 are verified by domain and 33 carry the platform’s blue tick.

Foreign ministers are unusually prominent here. Kaja Kallas is the most followed with 69,702 followers, ahead of Poland’s Radosław Sikorski (20,090), Austria’s Beate Meinl-Reisinger (11,823), Canada’s Anita Anand (7,072) and France’s Jean-Noël Barrot (6,725, +24%). Denmark’s Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Germany’s Johann Wadephul, Australia’s Penny Wong, the United Kingdom’s Yvette Cooper and Spain’s José Manuel Albares complete a Top 10 drawn entirely from Europe and the Anglosphere. Germany’s Auswärtiges Amt, with 24,780 followers, is the most followed foreign ministry.

What the platform lacks is everyone else. Bluesky is present in only 52 countries, and outside Europe, the Americas and Oceania it barely exists at all. Africa’s 14 accounts have 816 followers between them, a median of 30. Asia’s nine accounts total 671 followers, the largest being Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar with 242. India, Russia, Türkiye, Israel and Indonesia have no presence whatsoever, and the entire United States government is represented by a single @USAGov account with 265 followers.

The pattern is unmistakable. Bluesky grew as a refuge from X, and the leaders who moved there are those who found the alternative uncomfortable: EU institutions, Nordic and Benelux governments, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Brazil and Mexico. No populist of the right has followed them, no Gulf monarchy, no Asian power. Three years after its opening to the public, Bluesky has become the diplomatic salon of one political tradition rather than a public square, and its 1.2 million followers are less an audience than a statement about where a government prefers to be seen.

Quick links: Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Telegram | Threads | TikTok | WhatsApp | 𝕏 | YouTube

Facebook is most popular among government leaders in the Global South

Facebook is the social network where world leaders have their biggest audiences with over half a billion – 540,992,308 followers combined on the 838 pages of heads of state and government and foreign ministers surveyed.

Facebook is most popular among governments in the Global South and especially Asia. The 180 Asian government and leaders’ pages total 208 million followers (38% of the total) with a median of 162,000 followers, double the global median. European leaders and governments have more pages (226) but only 89 million followers combined and a median of just 66,500. Africa fields the most pages of any continent (239). Growth is healthy overall: the median growth among all pages is +14.6% year-on-year according to the DigiTips ranking as of 1 May 2026.

The leaders of El Salvador, Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Ethiopia all rank among the 10 most followed Facebook pages of world leaders. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in the lead with some 70 million followers on his personal page @NarendraModi and the institutional @PMOIndia page..

Trump’s Facebook comeback. Beyond his personal @DonaldTrump page with 41 million followers and a growth of +14%, the official @POTUS page rocketed from 271,000 to 11 million followers over the past 12 months which represents a growth rate of +3,959%, the biggest growth in the dataset.

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele places third. The Facebook page of the social media-savvy president has grown by 60% to over 13 million followers.

India’s President Droupadi Murmu is the most followed female leader on Facebook with 6.5 million followers. Her @PresidentOfIndia page places 11th and narrowly miss the Top 10 list. Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni are the other two leading female leaders with 5.9 and 4.3 million followers respectively on their Facebook pages.

G7 leaders are Facebook minnows.

Apart from Donald Trump the G7 leaders show poorly on Facebook. French President Emmanuel Macron is the most followed EU leader with 5.7 million, ahead of Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni with 4.3 million and newly elected Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar with 1.4 million. Canada’s Mark Carney almost quadrupled his followers up from 399,000 to 1.5 million. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer (637,000 followers), Japan’s Takaichi Sanae (170,000 followers), and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (143,000 followers) have less than a million. Meanwhile China and Russia’s leaders are not on Facebook, but their ministries of foreign affairs are.

Personal beats institutional.

343 personal pages hold 335 million followers (62% of the total) versus 176 million followers across 472 institutional pages which seems to confirm that Facebook users prefer to follow leaders, not offices.

However, some foreign ministries have amassed quite large audiences namely the U.S. State Department, with a combined total of 4.3 million followers. The foreign offices of Egypt and India have more than 2 million followers respectively and the Philippines and Germany (which has a strong Spanish language page) register over a million followers.

Foreign ministers are less popular on Facebook than the heads of state and government. The 116 personal pages of foreign ministers have a median of only 16,000 followers. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the only one who has more than a million followers combined on his personal and his senatorial pages.

And finally, Pope Leo XIV has no personal Facebook page, however Vatican News has a global page with 11 million followers in multiple languages.

Quick links: Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Telegram | Threads | TikTok | WhatsApp | 𝕏 | YouTube

Narendra Modi first past 100 million on Instagram

Instagram is the third biggest platform for world leaders with 481,169,294 followers combined on the 753 accounts of heads of state and government, foreign ministers and their institutions, up from 700 accounts a year ago.

The typical Instagram audience remains smaller than on Facebook, with a median of 29,108 followers per account against 80,000 on Facebook, but the picture network is growing faster, with a median follower growth of 17% year-on-year compared to 15% on Facebook. Eleven leaders keep private Instagram accounts, and 22 accounts are dormant or inactive.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the first world leader to break the 100-million barrier on Instagram with almost 102 million followers on his personal @NarendraModi account (+8%). His Instagram audience is almost twice the size of his Facebook page.

US President Donald Trump has a combined following of 63 million on his personal @realdonaldtrump account, which grew by a third to 44 million, and the institutional @POTUS account with 19 million. The @WhiteHouse account registered one of the strongest growth rates of any institution, up 43% to 12 million followers.

Instagram is Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s network of choice. With 16 million followers, the Ukrainian President is the third most followed leader on the platform, almost five times his Facebook audience.

Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto (15 million) is the only leader in the Top 10 losing followers (-1%), ahead of Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (14.6 million, +9%). Pope Leo XIV attracted 13.3 million followers on the new @Pontifex account within his first year in office, instantly making him the seventh most followed world leader, whereas he has no personal presence on Facebook.

El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele (11.9 million, +19%) and Türkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (11.7 million) follow, ahead of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates (9.1 million).

Argentina’s Javier Milei comes in eleventh spot, with 6,433,202 followers, fewer than 30,000 ahead of French President Emmanuel Macron (6,405,925).

European leaders may trail in absolute numbers, but they are posting the strongest growth on the platform. Emmanuel Macron remains the most followed EU leader, up 44% year-on-year, just ahead of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni who grew 59% to 6 million followers. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz reached 3.2 million followers combined on his personal account and the institutional @Bundeskanzler account (+57%). Spain’s Pedro Sánchez more than tripled his following to 1.6 million.

Many leaders have started collaborations with their friends and peers or their institutional accounts to reach a wider audience as the posts appear on up to five profiles. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her Indian counterpart Narendra Modi took the now historic ‘Melodi’ selfie during COP28 in 2023. Their most recent video collaboration in late May 2026 has generated more than 290 million views and 13 million interactions on Instagram alone and helped boost the Italian Prime Minister who is the most followed female leader on Instagram. According to Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni begged him for a photo at the G7 Summit in Evian in June 2026, a claim she has categorically denied. The exchange deepened the rift between the two politicians.”

India’s President Droupadi Murmu, whose @PresidentOfIndia account grew 28% to 5.8 million followers is the second most followed female leader ahead of Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum (3.1 million, +32%), and Tanzania’s Samia Suluhu Hassan (3.1 million, +12%). Japan’s Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae completes the female Top 5 with 1.3 million followers on Instagram, almost eight times her Facebook audience.

Geographically, Instagram is the mirror image of Facebook. Asian leaders and governments dominate with 213 million followers on 172 accounts, 44% of the total. Europe fields the most accounts of any continent, 245, but they total only 105 million followers. Africa, which has the most pages on Facebook, is Instagram’s blind spot: its 162 accounts muster just 20 million followers combined with a median of 7,472. Latin American presidents, by contrast, have the largest typical audiences: with a median of more than 100,000 followers per account, South America tops all continents.

As on Facebook, personal accounts beat institutional ones: the 323 personal accounts hold 380 million followers, 79% of the total, compared with 87 million followers on the 408 institutional accounts.

Foreign ministers barely register on the picture network. The 102 personal accounts of foreign ministers have a median of only 6,689 followers. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the most followed foreign minister with 5.6 million followers combined across his personal (2.5 million), Secretary (2.1 million) and senatorial accounts. He more than tripled his following in a year, the strongest growth of any foreign minister, ahead of India’s Subrahmanyam Jaishankar with 3.5 million followers (+37%).

Quick links: Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Telegram | Threads | TikTok | WhatsApp | 𝕏 | YouTube

LinkedIn: the network where nobody unfollows

LinkedIn is the network where nobody unfollows, and where hardly anybody posts. The 450 accounts and pages of world leaders, governments and foreign ministries count 36,971,353 followers combined, but the median account has just 3,597 followers, the second-smallest typical audience of any network in this study.

What LinkedIn audiences lack in size they make up in loyalty: the median account grew 17% year-on-year and only six accounts lost followers. Audiences on the professional network only move in one direction. Engagement is another matter: almost half of all accounts, 47%, are inactive or dormant, set up once and quietly abandoned.

LinkedIn is also the only network in this study where institutions out-perform the personal pages of politicians. The 253 institutional pages have a median of 5,214 followers against 2,264 for the leaders’ personal profiles, an inversion of the pattern on every other platform. LinkedIn is a network of press offices, ministries and civil services more than of leaders themselves.

However, leaders who are active and engaging reap the benefits. Narendra Modi claims his fifth platform crown with 5.4 million followers (+15%), ahead of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates (3.5 million, +6%) and Emmanuel Macron, whose 3.1 million followers have all but stopped growing (+3%). Ursula von der Leyen (2 million, +18%) and UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (1 million) complete the Top 5.

The story of the year, however, belongs to Mark Carney. The banker-turned-Prime Minister more than doubled his following (+157%) to become the first Canadian leader past the million mark, and it is hard to imagine a head of government more native to LinkedIn’s habitat.

The same logic lifts the platform’s other fast risers: German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (+56% to 347,000), Belgium’s Bart De Wever (+47%) and New Zealand’s Christopher Luxon (+42%) – the professional-class politicians thrive on the professional network.

LinkedIn itself has taken notice: at least 15 world leaders now carry the platform’s editorial ‘Top Voice’ badge, among them Modi, Macron, Giorgia Meloni, both UAE sheikhs, Carney, Keir Starmer, Merz, Anthony Albanese and Cyril Ramaphosa. No other network officially certifies heads of state as content creators.

Geographically, LinkedIn is the Brussels network. European accounts hold 16.8 million followers, 45% of the total, with a median of 7,796, more than double the global figure, and the EU institutions themselves rank among the biggest accounts, from the European Commission (2.5 million, +13%), to the Council of the European Union (459,000) and the Dutch Rijksoverheid (413,000), with the French and Italian government pages at around 200,000 each. The Government of Canada (1.1 million, +23%), the Prime Minister’s Office of the UAE (414,000) as well as the governments of Australia and Japan rank prominently in the Top 10 list of government pages.

The absentees are just as telling. Donald Trump has no personal LinkedIn profile, leaving The White House page (107,000, +34%) to carry the American flag, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Claudia Sheinbaum and Javier Milei are absent too, while Nayib Bukele keeps a token profile with 3,340 followers. The whole of South America musters just 609,000 followers across 30 accounts. LinkedIn is hardly present in Africa where South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is in the lead with 350,000 followers. The Global South broadcasts elsewhere. LinkedIn remains the network of the professional West, the Gulf, and India.

Among the foreign ministers on LinkedIn French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot stands out with 120,000 followers and a 48% growth year on year. Luxembourg’s former Prime Minister and now Foreign Minister Xavier Bettel is in second position with 114,000 followers.

Xavier Bettel as well as Canada’s Mark Carney and Austria’s Foreign Minister Beate Meinl-Reisinger are among a handful of leaders and ministers who have not yet created their custom URL. Their LinkedIn profile slugs still carry a letter-and-number combination after their names.

Foreign ministries do well on reflecting the size of their diplomatic network since most of their diplomats tend to follow the mothership. The page of the U.S. State Department aptly named DOScareers leads the pack (1.6 million, +9%) followed by the UK Foreign Office, the French Foreign Ministry, Canada’s Foreign Service and the European External Action Service.

The one non-Western power centre is the Gulf: the six accounts of the United Arab Emirates total 5.1 million followers, making it the second country on the platform behind only India.

It is interesting to note that the government in the Netherlands has created a showcase page for their Prime Minister Rob Jetten which is subordinated to the Ministry of General Affairs. The government of Panama has created showcase pages for the different ministries including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Presidency which is a smart way to reflect the government structures on the platform.

Quick links: Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Telegram | Threads | TikTok | WhatsApp | 𝕏 | YouTube

Which World Leaders are losing followers on Telegram?

Telegram is the only network where leaders are losing followers. The 111 channels of world leaders, governments and foreign ministries in 49 countries count 5,466,183 subscribers combined, with a median of 8,905 subscribers per channel. But the median channel lost 3% of its audience over the past year and 58% of all channels ended the year smaller than they began it, a rate of attrition no other platform comes close to.

The explanation lies in what Telegram became. It is the war network, and the war’s audience is receding. Ukraine, Russia and Belarus alone account for 45% of every subscriber in this study. Ukraine has eight channels and 1.5 million subscribers, more than a quarter of the entire platform, and almost all of them are contracting: the Ukraine NOW government channel lost 15%, the Office of the President 12%, Team Zelensky 15%. Volodymyr Zelenskyy remains the most followed leader on the platform with 670,970 subscribers, but even he shed 5%. Four years after Telegram became the primary channel through which Ukrainians followed the invasion, the audience is turning away from this channel dominated by a Russian-speaking audience.

Russia’s state channels, by contrast, are among the few still growing, if slowly: the Kremlin’s news channel added 7% to reach 288,568 subscribers, the Foreign Ministry 6% and the Government 0.3%. Six Russian channels hold 671,816 subscribers between them.

Beyond the war, Telegram is the platform of Central and Southeast Asian presidencies. Cambodia’s Hun Manet is the outlier of the year, growing 41% to 554,116 subscribers, the second most followed leader on the platform. Uzbekistan’s Shavkat Mirziyoyev (241,686, +16%), Belarus’s presidential pool (245,335, +8%) and Kazakhstan’s Aqorda (76,253, +21%) follow, with the Kazakh presidential broadcaster growing fastest of all at +146%. Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed (168,634, +9%) is the only African leader of scale, and Syria’s new presidency channel enters the ranking at 199,973 subscribers. India’s MyGov Newsdesk, meanwhile, lost a fifth of its subscribers, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan 16% and Brazil’s Canal do Lula 16%.

What is most revealing, however, is how Western governments use Telegram: not to reach their own citizens, but to reach other people’s. Western Europe fields just six channels with 49,618 subscribers in total. Emmanuel Macron, with 32,640, is the only Western leader with a meaningful presence, and three of France’s four channels are the Élysée, the foreign ministry’s Russian-language feed and his foreign minister. Germany’s only channel is its embassy in Moscow. The United States is represented by two channels alone, one broadcasting in Russian and one in Persian. Israel runs seven, in Hebrew, Russian, Persian, Arabic and English, its Persian-language channel almost doubling to 115,061 subscribers.

On Telegram, in other words, Western foreign ministries are not doing public diplomacy but counter-programming: speaking past hostile governments to Russian and Persian-speaking audiences on the one platform those audiences use. It is the clearest example in this study of a network being used as an instrument of information warfare rather than as a channel for domestic communication.

It is also, unusually, an institutional platform: 76 of the 111 channels belong to governments, presidencies and ministries rather than to individual leaders, and only 33 are personal. Telegram’s format explains it. A channel is a broadcast feed with no comments, no likes and no algorithm, well suited to a press service issuing statements at speed and poorly suited to a politician seeking a following. That may also be why so few new leaders have joined: unlike every other network in this study, Telegram is not attracting a new generation of leaders to replace the audience it is losing.

Quick links: Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Telegram | Threads | TikTok | WhatsApp | 𝕏 | YouTube

Why are so few World Leaders on Threads?

Threads is the network world leaders forgot. Three years after its launch, only 245 accounts of heads of state and government, foreign ministers and their institutions are active on Meta’s microblogging platform, up from 210 a year ago and 191 in 2024. That is barely a third of the 753 leader accounts on Instagram, even though setting up a Threads profile requires little more than a tap from an existing Instagram account. Their combined following of 21 million, with a median of 11,462 followers per account, amounts to just 4% of the leaders’ half-billion-strong Instagram audience.

The maths of the platform is sobering: the median Threads account attracts just 13.5% of its owner’s Instagram audience. Leaders bring their verified handle, their content pipeline and their name recognition to the new platform, and six out of seven of their Instagram followers stay behind.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the undisputed champion of Threads with 3.1 million followers (+10%), converting an above-average 22% of his Instagram audience. It is no accident: Brazil is Threads’ second-largest market with some 36 million users. El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele follows with 2.2 million and the strongest growth in the Top 10 (+46%), ahead of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy (2.1 million, +13%). Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates (987,000), and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni the EU’s most followed leader (695,000, +35%) complete the Top 5 list.

More striking is who is not on the list: six of the ten most followed leaders on Instagram have no Threads presence at all. Narendra Modi, Donald Trump and the entire White House apparatus, Prabowo Subianto, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Pope Leo XIV and King Charles III are all absent, as are Emmanuel Macron, Javier Milei and India’s President Droupadi Murmu. The paradox is greatest for Modi: the most followed world leader on Instagram has never posted on Threads, even though India is the platform’s largest market with more than 50 million users.

Their absence is, in large part, of Meta’s own making. In February 2024, Meta announced that Instagram and Threads would no longer proactively recommend political content, which users had to actively opt in to see. For politicians, a network whose algorithm was designed to keep their content away from new audiences held little appeal, and Meta only reversed the policy in January 2025, conceding that its approach had been too blunt.

Threads was effectively closed for political business during the exact window when world leaders were deciding whether to adopt it. Donald Trump is a case apart: the US President co-owns his own network, Truth Social, where he is contractually bound to post first, and was banned from Meta’s platforms between 2021 and 2023. For everyone else the calculus was simply unfavourable: X still holds the diplomatic and journalistic audience that leaders want for their text statements, while Threads offered a fraction of an audience they already had elsewhere, for a parallel content workload.

The result is a platform of abandoned storefronts. 95 of the 245 accounts, or 39%, are dormant or inactive. Many leaders set up shop in the early days, posted a few times, and quietly walked away. And yet, no one is losing followers: the median account grew by 23% year-on-year, the strongest growth rate of any network in this study, and only a single account registered a decline. Threads followers accumulate whether leaders post or not.

There are signs the calculus is changing. Threads reached 500 million monthly active users in June 2026 and overtook X in daily active users in late 2025, closing in on its rival’s estimated 550 million monthly users. Since political content returned to the recommendation algorithms, the early adopters are being rewarded: the European Commission (371,000, +83%) and Ursula von der Leyen (242,000, +114%) retain over 31% of their Instagram audiences on Threads, the best conversion rates of any Western institution, and the fastest-growing account in the entire dataset is the presidency of the Democratic Republic of Congo (+137%). Egypt’s presidency has even achieved the rarest feat: its Threads following is double its Instagram audience, the only major account where the newcomer beats the incumbent. For the holdouts, the network they forgot may soon be too big to ignore.

Quick links: Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Telegram | Threads | TikTok | WhatsApp | 𝕏 | YouTube

World Leaders on TikTok

TikTok is the only major network on which the world’s most followed leader does not exist. Narendra Modi, who tops the rankings on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and X, has no TikTok account, for the simple reason that his own government banned the platform in June 2020 and has never lifted the ban. Six years on, the absence of India, and of China, still shapes the map of political TikTok.

What is left is smaller but far livelier than the numbers suggest. The 370 accounts of world leaders, governments and foreign ministries across 143 countries count 132,390,164 followers combined, less than a fifth of the following on X, with a median of 13,750 followers per account. But they have collected more than 1.9 billion likes, and the audience is growing faster than on almost any other platform: the median account gained 19% over the past year and only 13% of accounts lost followers, against 35% on X.

With Modi absent, Donald Trump tops the ranking, and on a platform he once tried to ban. His @realDonaldTrump account counts 16.4 million followers (+9%) and the campaign-style @TeamTrump account another 13.6 million, with a staggering 361 million likes, the most of any political account in this study. The White House adds 6.5 million followers.

In January 2026, after four extensions of the divest-or-ban deadline, TikTok’s U.S. operations passed to the majority American-owned TikTok USDS Joint Venture, with Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX holding 45% and ByteDance retaining 19.9%. The platform Trump moved to outlaw in 2020 he now both governs and dominates.

Behind him, TikTok is Latin America’s network. El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele is the most followed leader outside the United States with 11.7 million followers (+11%), Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum has 9 million and 158 million likes, making her the most followed female leader on any platform in this study, and Brazil’s Lula counts 5.4 million. Javier Milei (3.1 million), Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa (2.8 million) and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro (2.5 million, +25%) follow. South American accounts have by far the largest typical audience of any continent, with a median of 80,900 followers, six times the global median.

France’s Emmanuel Macron is the most followed EU leader with 7 million followers ahead of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni with 3.6 million followers after adding 50% in a year. Germany’s Friedrich Merz who has a personal channel and the institutional @Bundeskanzler account is in third place (931,900). Spain’s Pedro Sánchez (846,900) and Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki (624,800) complete the Top 5 list.

Africa and South America are the platform’s fastest-growing regions with a median growth of 24%. Africa’s 90 accounts across 38 countries hold 9.8 million followers, only 7% of the global total, with a median of 9,354 followers, below the global figure. But the continent’s combined following grew 54% over the past year.

Kenya’s William Samoei Ruto leads with 1.8 million followers (+86%), ahead of Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni (914,800) and Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who almost doubled his following to 489,600. Rwanda’s Paul Kagame (245,400) and Zambia’s Hakainde Hichilema (229,700, +93%) complete the Top 5 List.

Institutions are catching up fastest of all: the presidency of the Democratic Republic of Congo (1.5 million, +36%) and Senegal’s presidency (916,400, +43%) are in the lead and the government of Côte d’Ivoire multiplied its following sevenfold to 225,500 and the South African Government more than sixfold to 140,800.

The absentees, however, are as instructive as the leaders. Beyond India and China, Egypt and the Vatican have no presence at all, Türkiye’s presidency has fewer than 200 followers, Saudi Arabia is effectively absent, and Russia is represented only by its foreign ministry with 19,400 followers.

Nor is having an account the same as using one. Of the 370 accounts in this study, 102, more than a quarter, have fewer than 1,000 followers, and ten have none at all: reserved handles registered by governments to stop anyone else taking the name, then left untouched. Ukraine offers the neatest illustration: the dormant @ZelenskyyUA handle sits at zero followers while the Team Zelensky account, run by his office, has 2 million.

On TikTok, followers matter less than views, and the like counts reveal who has mastered the format. Cambodia’s Hun Manet has collected 36 likes for every follower and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa 30, followed by Hungary’s Péter Magyar (28) and Team Trump (27). Collectively, leaders’ accounts added 29% more likes over the past year, growing engagement faster than audience.

The most systematic operation on the platform belongs to Israel, whose foreign ministry runs a multilingual TikTok network: the English @Israel account (1.4 million, +27%), @IsraelinSpanish (949,800) and @IsraelArabic (247,900), for a combined 2.6 million followers across three languages, alongside Benjamin Netanyahu’s personal account, which doubled to 1.4 million. Ukraine’s foreign ministry (1.3 million) is the only other diplomatic service at that scale.

Elsewhere, the fastest growth comes from unexpected places. Armenia’s Nikol Pashinyan grew 262% to 362,000, Brazil’s @GovernodoBrasil more than tripled to 1.8 million and Peru’s presidency added 186%. Foreign ministers, by contrast, have yet to arrive. Only 40 have personal accounts, with a median of barely 2,000 followers, and Poland’s Radosław Sikorski leads them with a modest 65,900.

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Governments and leaders lose and gain on WhatsApp

On WhatsApp Channels, Meta giveth and Meta taketh away. Two and a half years after their launch in September 2023, 78 channels of world leaders, governments and foreign ministries broadcast to 30,466,117 followers combined, up from 64 channels in 2025 and 35 in 2024. Thanks to WhatsApp’s enormous reach across the Global South, the median channel counts 72,107 followers, more than six times the median Threads account. But the platform has the weakest momentum of any network in this study: the median channel grew by just 1.5% over the past year, and almost half of all channels, 48%, are shedding followers.

One man towers over the platform: Narendra Modi’s channel counts 15.6 million followers, 51% of the entire WhatsApp following of world leaders, making WhatsApp the most concentrated network in this study. The Indian Prime Minister’s channel has ridden a rollercoaster that tells the story of the platform itself: promoted by Meta at launch, it peaked at 14.1 million followers in February 2024, lost 17% of its audience by May 2025 as the launch effect unwound, and then roared back with 35% growth to reach a new high this year.

Most of the launch generation has not been as fortunate. When WhatsApp introduced Channels, Meta seeded the discovery directory and pushed a select group of official channels to its billions of users, inflating follower counts with people who tapped follow once and never looked back. Once the promotion stopped, the unfollowing began. The channels that already existed in early 2024 have shed followers at a median rate of 7% over the past year, with 56% of them in decline, while channels created later grew at a median of 6%.

The two-year toll on the early showcase channels is stark: Morocco’s government channel has lost almost half its audience since May 2024, falling from 600,000 to 310,000 followers, South Africa’s presidency is down 38% to 413,000, and Brazil’s flagship Governo do Brasil channel, once the second-largest in the world, has dropped 16% to 2.7 million. The decline is not limited to the early adopters: Claudia Sheinbaum’s channel lost 31% and Cyril Ramaphosa’s 34% in the past year alone.

WhatsApp’s discovery directory surfaces popular channels country by country, and the newer arrivals are reaping the benefit. Spain’s Gobierno de España multiplied its following twelvefold to 283,000, Nigeria’s government channel grew 465% to 431,000, and Ivory Coast’s government added 57% to reach 423,000. Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, the most followed Latin American leader on the platform with 487,000 followers, grew 50% on top of quadrupling the year before, and the press office of Nayib Bukele added 67%. The UK government channel is up 40% to 389,000 and Germany’s Bundesregierung, which multiplied ninefold in 2025, has settled into steady growth at 742,000 followers.

Unlike every other network in this study, WhatsApp is a governments’ platform rather than a leaders’ one. Behind Modi, the biggest channels are institutional: Brazil’s Governo do Brasil (2.7 million), South Africa’s GovernmentZA (1.3 million), India’s MyGov (812,000) and the German Bundesregierung. Few heads of state broadcast in person: Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum (739,000), Tanzania’s Samia Suluhu Hassan (546,000), Cyril Ramaphosa (501,000) and Petro lead a short list. The format explains it: a WhatsApp channel is a one-way megaphone with no comments and no public metrics beyond emoji reactions, better suited to a government press office than to a politician in search of engagement.

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World Leaders on X

X is still the undisputed heavyweight of digital diplomacy, but it has stopped growing. With 1,179 accounts of heads of state and government, foreign ministers and their institutions, and 818,004,134 followers combined, no other network comes close: X hosts more leader accounts than any platform and a bigger combined audience than Facebook (541 million) or Instagram (481 million), with a median of 44,369 followers per account. The platform that gave its name to Twiplomacy is standing still. The median account added just 1.6% over the past year, and 369 accounts, more than a third, lost followers, among the weakest momentum of the major networks in this study.

At the top, the crown is contested. Narendra Modi remains the most followed world leader on X with 165.1 million followers combined on his personal account and the institutional @PMOIndia (58.3 million, itself the third most followed account on the platform).

Donald Trump follows with 115.7 million combined on @realDonaldTrump and the institutional @POTUS account. The U.S. President can, however, claim one record: with 111.6 million followers (+7%), @realDonaldTrump is now the largest single leader account on any social network, having overtaken Modi’s personal handle which is, remarkably, the sole shrinking property in the Indian Prime Minister’s social media empire (-1%). Add the presidential Rashtrapati Bhavan account (28.1 million, the fourth most followed) and India’s top three accounts alone total 193 million followers.

Pope Leo XIV, whose @Pontifex accounts total 48 million across nine language editions, India’s President Droupadi Murmu (28.1 million) and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (23.5 million) complete the Top 5, ahead of Emmanuel Macron (10.5 million, +3%), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (10.2 million, +7%) and Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum (10 million). Gustavo Petro and Volodymyr Zelenskyy (both 8.4 million) and Nayib Bukele (7.9 million) follow.

African leaders are among the most followed on the platform but barely growing. Kenya’s William Ruto leads with 6.9 million followers, far ahead of Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni (3.7 million), Rwanda’s Paul Kagame (3.3 million) and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa (3.2 million, +5%). Nigeria’s Bola Ahmed Tinubu completes the Top 5 and posts the strongest growth among the continent’s big accounts (+10% to 3 million), but the broader picture is stagnation: Ruto, Kagame and Ghana’s John Dramani Mahama all ended the year flat or marginally down.

The Arab leaders’ ranking is led by the Gulf royals, and they are the platform’s most conspicuous decliners. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum (10 million, -11%) and King Salman of Saudi Arabia (9.7 million, -8%) and Jordan’s King Abdullah II (2.5 million, flat) all trail their 2025 numbers, while Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (6.3 million) and UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed (5.2 million) are treading water. Algeria’s Abdelmadjid Tebboune (+4% to 2.2 million) is the rare Arab leader in positive territory.

East Asian leaders are quietly backing away from X. Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto remains the region’s most followed at 4.8 million but lost 6% of his audience, and Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim (1.9 million) and the Philippines’ Bongbong Marcos (1.3 million) also declined. The region’s momentum belongs to its newcomers: Japan’s Takaichi Sanae debuts at 2.9 million – X is by far her biggest network – South Korea’s Lee Jae Myung enters at 1.1 million, Cambodia’s Hun Manet more than doubled his following (+159%), and Singapore’s Lawrence Wong added 37%.

Among EU leaders, Emmanuel Macron (10.5 million) remains in a league of his own: no other EU leader reaches a third of his following. Giorgia Meloni grew 13% to 3.3 million and Pedro Sánchez 24% to 2.5 million. At 1,712,312 followers (+6%) the EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is the fifth most followed EU leader. Five European leaders have personal and institutional accounts and are therefore among the Top 10 including Poland’s Donald Tusk (2.7 million, -4%), Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten (1.5 million), EU Council President Antonio Costa (1.2 million, -4%), Greece’s Kyriakos Mitsotakis (1.2 million, -3%) and Germany’s Friedrich Merz (750,000).

Latin American leaders treat X as home turf: the region’s accounts have the largest typical audience of any continent, and its presidents the busiest keyboards. Lula (10.2 million, +7%) leads Gustavo Petro (8.4 million), Nayib Bukele (7.9 million) and Claudia Sheinbaum, whose +10% to 4.7 million is the strongest growth among the region’s presidents, ahead of the hyperactive Javier Milei (4.1 million).

Beneath the surface, a very specific set of benches is thinning. The year’s decliner list reads like a geopolitical map: Erdoğan lost 10% of his following and the Turkish presidency 7%, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid shed 11%, as did UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed, King Salman lost 8%, the Kremlin 13% and the Russian Foreign Ministry 9%. Even the Holy See is not spared: the Pope’s Spanish and Italian accounts each lost 11%. The Gulf monarchies, Ankara, Moscow and the Vatican’s non-English audiences are all quietly draining from the platform.

And yet nothing demonstrates X’s enduring geopolitical weight like the accounts that surged. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi multiplied his following fivefold (+429%) to 853,000 in the wake of the June 2025 war, President Masoud Pezeshkian nearly tripled his, and Israel’s Persian-language account grew 25% in mirror image: when the missiles flew, the information war was fought on X. The other surge came from Washington: the @WhiteHouse account grew 163% to 4.5 million and @POTUS gained 31%, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio reached 7 million followers combined on his personal and @SecRubio accounts (+13%). Canada’s Mark Carney (+69%) completes the picture of a platform that still rewards those in the news.

No platform is worked harder. El Salvador’s presidential press office posts 194 times a day, and Javier Milei, personally averaging 98 posts a day, is surely the most hyperactive head of state on Earth. Colombia’s presidency posts 41 times, and Gustavo Petro himself 27 times per day. For Latin America’s leaders in particular, X is less a channel than a firehose.

2025 has seen the emergence of bespoke accounts for real-time updates specifically designed for information warfare. The White House’s @RapidResponse47 rapid-rebuttal account fires 56 times a day to spread news about the activities of President Donald Trump. The French Foreign Ministry has set up its very own @FrenchResponse account in September 2025 which debunks fake and misleading news mainly from Russian but also U.S. influencers, including the White House under Donald Trump. The American account is a firehose, the French one a sniper and posting with a great deal of wit, still out-followed its own ministry’s English account.

The oldest accounts in the study, Japan’s @japan and Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim, both joined Twitter in March 2007, and 111 accounts predate 2010. Yet leaders keep joining even in the Musk era, with 105 accounts created since 2023.

The platform’s verification chaos, meanwhile, is its own story: 38% of all the government accounts are not verified, 112 accounts are paying for the blue verification mark, while 608 carry the free official governmental grey badge.

The governments of Benin, El Salvador, Israel, Japan, Kuwait and the United States have taken out X’s premium subscription for organizations allowing them to have unlimited affiliate accounts for their ministries and embassies.

Geographically, Asia dominates with 334 million followers, 41% of the total, while Europe fields the most accounts (327) for 184 million. North America’s 168.7 million is almost entirely the Trump concentration, sitting atop a modest median of 19,000, and South American accounts have, once again, the largest typical audience of any continent with a median of 92,171 followers.

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World Leaders on YouTube

YouTube is the platform where world leaders have published the most and are watched the least. The 483 channels of heads of state and government, governments and foreign ministries count only 81,014,775 subscribers combined, with a median of 5,460 subscribers per channel, one of the smallest typical audiences of any major network in this study. Yet those channels have uploaded 803,417 videos and accumulated 28.4 billion views. Nowhere else do leaders produce so much for so few followers.

It is also the steadiest platform. The median channel gained 8% over the past year and only 7% of channels lost subscribers, one of the lowest attrition rates of any network in this study. Subscriptions on YouTube are a one-way ratchet: viewers may stop watching, but they rarely unsubscribe. That is visible in the activity data, where 105 channels, more than a fifth, have not posted a video in over a year.

No leader dominates any platform the way Narendra Modi dominates YouTube. His personal and institutional @PMOIndia channels count 32.3 million subscribers, 38% of all the subscribers in this study, and 8.8 billion views, 30% of the total, across 41,844 videos. Add the President of India (2.98 million), and MyGov India (1.11 million, +29%) and a single country accounts for more than 45% of the world’s leader subscribers on the platform.

Donald Trump follows at a distance with 3.97 million subscribers, though his channel was flat over the year (+0.3%), while The White House grew 24% to 3.08 million. South Korea’s Lee Jae Myung (1.93 million), Brazil’s Lula (1.6 million), Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum (1.54 million, +22%), the British Monarchy (1.44 million) and Volodymyr Zelenskyy (1.37 million) complete the upper tier, alongside the Vatican’s main channel (1.16 million) and Mexico’s government (1.09 million).

The oddest entry in the Top 10 belongs to Nepal. Balendra Shah, the rapper and structural engineer who became Prime Minister in March 2026 at the age of 35 after his party’s landslide victory, brings a channel with 1.3 million subscribers and 97 million views from just 25 videos, an average of 3.9 million views each. Almost none of it is political: the world’s youngest serving head of government arrived in office with a rap channel, and it is the most watched-per-video leader channel on the platform.

Hungary’s new Prime Minister Péter Magyar leads with 399,000 subscribers and 151.8 million views, narrowly ahead of Emmanuel Macron (397,000, +6%) and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni (366,000, +23%).

Poland is the platform’s most crowded political market, with four channels above 100,000 subscribers: Prime Minister Donald Tusk (144,000), the Chancellery (110,000), the presidency’s Prezydent.pl (107,000, +90%) and President Karol Nawrocki (102,000). Hungary’s government channel, with 10,991 videos and 313 million views, is the most watched in Europe. The 96 channels of EU leaders, governments and foreign ministries count 4.2 million subscribers between them, less than a seventh of Modi’s two channels, with a median of just 4,040 subscribers.

Subscriber counts, in fact, tell only part of the story, because on YouTube the view is the currency and the two diverge sharply. Brazil’s Portal Brasil has just 275,000 subscribers but 4.6 billion views across 2,042 videos, an implausible 2.2 million views per video, and South Korea’s government channel reports 1.37 billion views from 1,082 videos. Numbers on that scale point to paid promotion rather than organic viewing: on YouTube, unlike anywhere else, governments can simply buy an audience, and several of the platform’s biggest view counts appear to have been bought.

At the other extreme lies the platform’s real character: the unwatched government archive. El Salvador’s presidential press secretariat has uploaded 30,588 videos, an average of 2,370 views each. Colombia’s presidency has posted 22,249 and Uruguay’s 20,018, averaging 1,456 views. Cambodia’s rapid-response unit has published 12,444 videos watched an average of 79 times, and the Prime Minister’s own channel 6,021 videos averaging 96 views. For dozens of governments, YouTube is not a broadcast channel at all but a public video registry: a place to deposit the footage of every ceremony and press conference, addressed to the record rather than to an audience.

The Holy See runs the most extensive multilingual operation on the platform, with ten channels totalling 2.9 million subscribers, led by the main Vatican channel (1.16 million), its Spanish edition (969,000), Italian (319,000) and, remarkably, Vietnamese (257,000). But the same archive logic applies at the margins: the Vatican’s Slovenian and Lithuanian channels have uploaded thousands of videos watched, on average, a couple of hundred times each.

Growth, where it happens, is institutional. El Salvador’s press secretariat multiplied its subscribers almost eightfold, the European Commission more than doubled to 469,000, Poland’s Prezydent.pl grew 90%, Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto 57%, Japan’s Kantei 43% and India’s Ministry of External Affairs 38%. Even the Kremlin’s channel added 24%. Declines are so rare as to be notable: France’s Gouvernement (-2%), Javier Milei (-0.8%) and 10 Downing Street (-0.3%) are the only significant channels that shrank.

Geographically, Asia holds 48.8 million subscribers, 60% of the total, and 15.1 billion views, while Europe fields the most channels (161) for 12.9 million subscribers. Africa’s 98 channels, the second-largest contingent, muster just 2.8 million subscribers between them, less than a tenth of Modi’s single channel.

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All figures are as of 1 May 2026. Download the full DigiTips Social Media Ranking and Digital Atlas: https://luefkens.gumroad.com/l/DigiTipsSocialMediaRankings2026