More Than a Third of U.S. Teens Are on Social Media Almost Constantly, Survey Says

Almost half of U.S. teens reported that they are online “almost constantly,” a jump from the 24% who reported similar behavior to Pew in 2015.

On social media specifically, 35% of U.S. teens reported that they were on at least one of the major platforms almost constantly. Pew didn’t survey teens on that question in 2015.

The popularity of Meta Platforms Inc.’s flagship app Facebook plunged among teens in recent years, according to the study. While 71% of teens said in the 2015 survey that they used Facebook, 32% said they are on the platform today.

Meta’s Instagram and Snapchat—owned by parent company Snap Inc.—came in third and fourth of shares of teens who are on each platform. Both grew in popularity among teen users from the last time the survey was conducted.

Younger users, especially teens, are seen as tastemakers and thus prized by advertisers. They also present long-term business opportunities for the platforms that can attract and keep them as users, potentially over many decades.

Most large social-media companies, including Meta and YouTube parent Alphabet Inc., have been pouring resources into short-form video features on their own platforms to compete with the rise of TikTok and draw in younger traffic.

“It’s an evolving landscape on multiple levels—not just the platforms themselves with different names and things, but also even individual platforms were one thing a while ago, and now are different,” said Lee Rainie, the director of internet and technology research at Pew and a co-lead author of the report, which was based on a survey of 1,316 teens.

The report also showed how deeply social media is ingrained in the lives of many teenagers, in ways that those surveyed say aren’t always positive. More than half of teens said giving up social media platforms would be challenging—with teen girls more likely to echo that sentiment—while a third of teens said too much of their time is used on social media apps and websites.

Teen access to smartphones has jumped by 22% since 2015, the survey found.

The Wall Street Journal last year reported that Facebook knew that Instagram is harmful for some of its young users, especially teen girls. Shortly after, a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general said they were investigating how Instagram attracts and affects young people.

A Meta spokesman said at the time that the investigation was premised on a misunderstanding of issues that also affect other social-media platforms.

Instagram, TikTok and other social-media companies over the past year have expanded their parental controls to give guardians more sway over what children see and how much time their teens spend on the app.

Snap on Tuesday rolled out a new set of controls, giving parents the ability to see who their children are friends with and who they communicated with in the last seven days.

Emily Vogels, a Pew research associate and co-lead author of the report, said in an interview that teens in focus groups conducted before the survey cited the pandemic as a factor in shaping which social media platforms they put the most hours into.

“Without being able to interact with others in the in-person environment, they were looking to see where their friends were going online, so that they could maintain those connections,” Ms. Vogels said.

Write to Sarah Donaldson at [email protected]