Johannesburg - TikTok has emerged as a top social media platform for US teenagers, according to a new Pew Research Centre survey which also found that the share of youngsters who use Facebook has fallen sharply.
The new report was based on a survey of 1 316 US teens conducted online from April 14 to May 4, 2022, using Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel.
The research was conducted by the Pew Research Centre, a non-partisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world.
According to the study of youngsters aged between 13 and 17, 67% of the respondents stated that they use the popular video social media platform, with 16% of them saying they use it almost constantly.
Meanwhile, fellow video platform YouTube also stood out as the most common platform used by teens, with 95% of US teens saying that they have used the website or app.
The majority of the study’s respondents also said that they use Instagram (62%) and Snapchat (59%).
Instagram and Snapchat use has grown since 2014-15, when roughly half of the surveyed youngsters said they used Instagram (52%) and about four-in-ten said they used Snapchat (41%).
Conversely, the share of teens using Twitter and Tumblr declined in this same period as some 23% of teens now say they use Twitter, compared with 33% in 2014-15. And while 14% of teens in 2014-15 reported using Tumblr, just 5% of teens today say they use this platform.
But the share of teens who say they use Facebook, a dominant social media platform among teens in the Centre’s 2014-15 survey, has plummeted from 71% then to 32% today.
There are also some notable demographic differences in teens’ social media choices in the Pew Research Centre study.
For example, teenage boys are more likely than teen girls to say they use YouTube, Twitch and Reddit, whereas teen girls are more likely than teen boys to use TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.
In addition, black American teens stand out for being most likely to use TikTok among the racial and ethnic groups covered in this report, followed by Hispanic teens and then white teens.
The study also found that older teenagers are more likely than their younger counterparts to say they use each of the online platforms asked about, except for YouTube and WhatsApp. Instagram is an especially notable example of the age gap, with 73% of teens aged between 15 to 17 who said that they use Instagram, compared with 45% of teens ages 13 to 14 who say the same (a 28 percentage point gap).
When it comes to the frequency that teens use the five major platforms the survey looked at – YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook – 35% of teens say they are using at least one of them “almost constantly.” About three-quarters of teens visit YouTube at least daily, including 19% who report using the site or app almost constantly. A majority of teens (58%) visit TikTok daily, while about half say the same for Snapchat (51%) and Instagram (50%). Comparatively, just 19% of teens say they visit Facebook daily.
Beyond online platforms, the new survey also found that the vast majority of teenagers have access to digital devices, such as smartphones (95%), desktop or laptop computers (90%) and gaming consoles (80%).
The study also showed there has been an uptick in daily teen internet users, from 92% in 2014-15 to 97% today. In addition, the share of teens who say they are online almost constantly has roughly doubled since 2014-15 (46% now and 24% then).