Kanye West on technology: what the evidence says · JRE #1554
“So, like only there's only a billion people on the Internet. You never think about that, the seven or eight billion people on on Earth, but then there's only a billion people that are influence and that are on the Internet.”
What the evidence says
West claimed that of the roughly seven-to-eight billion people on Earth, only about one billion use the internet. Global internet-usage estimates for the years around this podcast's 2020 release put the figure far higher: international data trackers estimated approximately 4.1 billion internet users in 2019, rising toward 4.9 billion by 2021, and a 2024 peer-reviewed analysis in Nature Communications states that internet access "has already reached more than 5 billion people (about 60% of the global population)." These figures are four to five times West's stated one billion, and the roughly 50-60% global penetration rate is far above the 12-15% implied by his claim. A meaningful digital divide does exist, with billions of people still unconnected, disproportionately in lower-income countries, but the specific one-billion figure understates actual global internet usage by a wide margin.