The extremely online life of the American teenager

Nearly half of US teens are “almost constantly” online, though the platforms they spend their time on vary significantly, according to a new Pew survey.

Despite some variety in their overall online habits, virtually all teenagers use YouTube. Of the 1,391 teenagers polled by the Pew Research Center, 90 percent said they use the site, a slight decrease from 95 percent in 2022. And 73 percent of them go on YouTube every day, making it by far the most popular platform for teenage users. The second-most popular app is TikTok, which 63 percent of teens say they use.

But there’s a gender divide, especially among teenagers who say they “almost constantly” use either app: 19 percent of girls say they use TikTok that often, while the same share of boys are constantly on YouTube.

And even this extremely online demographic isn’t using all websites equally. Just 6 percent of teenagers polled said they use Threads, Meta’s microblogging app, and only 32 percent use Facebook — down from 71 percent a decade ago. The only Meta product a majority of teenagers use is Instagram, whose popularity has increased since 2014.

There seems to be a preference for image- and video-based platforms among the teenagers polled: X and Reddit were also much less popular, with 17 percent and 14 percent of teens saying they use them, respectively. And teens’ X usage has declined significantly over the past decade: a decade ago, when it was still called Twitter, 33 percent of US teens used it. But teens’ use of some image-based apps — including Snapchat — is on the decline as well. In fact, the only app that has experienced a rise in popularity is WhatsApp, which is now used by 23 percent of teenagers.