Do you remember when Facebook replaced MySpace as the cool social media platform that everyone used? That familiar scene may be re-enacting itself. One piece of bad news about Facebook comes from a survey by the Pew Research Center. It asked 1,316 American teens between the ages of 13 and 17 about their Internet habits and found that only 32 percent of them use the Facebook app.
The results contrast with a 2015 survey by the Pew Research Center, which found that 71 percent of teens used Facebook heavily at the time, but since then, the social network has seen the share of this age group decline each year. Despite CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s call last year for the platform to refocus on younger users, more teens have abandoned it in droves.
While not really a social media site, the most popular platform among participants was YouTube, with 95 percent of teens surveyed saying they were using it – and 19 percent admitting to using the video streaming platform “almost all the time.
TikTok was the surprising runner-up, with 67 percent saying they use it and 16 percent admitting they are almost addicted to the app. But it’s not all bad news for Meta; Instagram, which Meta co-owns with Facebook, took third place, with 62 percent of teens using it and 10 percent of them saying they scroll through pictures and videos for extended periods of time.
Snapchat is another service whose usage among teens has risen since 2015, from 41% to 59%. both Twitter and Tumblr have declined, by 10% and 9%, respectively. twitch (20%), WhatsApp (17%) and Reddit (14%) were not included in the seven-year old survey, so no comparative data is available.
There are also a number of platforms that were popular in 2015 that no longer exist. At that time, 33% of teens used Google+ and 24% used Vine.
Another part of the recent survey asked teens which devices they own or have access to. Smartphones came in first at 95 percent, up from 73 percent in 2015. They are followed by desktop/laptop computers at 90%, up from 87% in 2015, and gaming consoles at 80%, down from 81% that year.
More than half of teens (54%) say they have a hard time giving up social media, and 36% worry they spend too much time on it. As for the number of people who use the Internet daily, it rose to 97%, up from 92% in 2015.
