The extremely online life of the American teenager

Nearly fractional of US teens are “almost constantly” online, though the platforms they walk their clip connected alteration significantly, according to a caller Pew survey.

Despite immoderate assortment successful their wide online habits, virtually each teenagers usage YouTube. Of the 1,391 teenagers polled by the Pew Research Center, 90 percent said they usage the site, a flimsy alteration from 95 percent successful 2022. And 73 percent of them spell connected YouTube each day, making it by acold the astir fashionable level for teenage users. The second-most fashionable app is TikTok, which 63 percent of teens accidental they use.

But there’s a sex divide, particularly among teenagers who accidental they “almost constantly” usage either app: 19 percent of girls accidental they usage TikTok that often, portion the aforesaid stock of boys are perpetually connected YouTube.

And adjacent this highly online demographic isn’t utilizing each websites equally. Just 6 percent of teenagers polled said they usage Threads, Meta’s microblogging app, and lone 32 percent usage Facebook — down from 71 percent a decennary ago. The lone Meta merchandise a bulk of teenagers usage is Instagram, whose popularity has accrued since 2014.

There seems to beryllium a penchant for image- and video-based platforms among the teenagers polled: X and Reddit were besides overmuch little popular, with 17 percent and 14 percent of teens saying they usage them, respectively. And teens’ X usage has declined importantly implicit the past decade: a decennary ago, erstwhile it was inactive called Twitter, 33 percent of US teens utilized it. But teens’ usage of immoderate image-based apps — including Snapchat — is connected the diminution arsenic well. In fact, the lone app that has experienced a emergence successful popularity is WhatsApp, which is present utilized by 23 percent of teenagers.