According to a Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday, US teenagers have left Facebook in droves over the past seven years, preferring to spend time on video sharing platforms YouTube and TikTok.
TikTok has “emerged as the top social media platform for US teens,” while Google-powered YouTube “is emerging as the most used platform by teens,” the report’s authors wrote.
Pew’s data comes from a time when Facebook owner Meta is vying with TikTok for social media dominance, trying to retain the maximum number of users as part of its multi-billion-dollar ad-driven business.
According to the report, about 95 percent of teens surveyed said they use YouTube, compared to 67 percent who said they were TikTok users.
Just 32 percent of teens surveyed said they signed up for Facebook — a big drop from the 71 percent who said they were users in a similar survey about seven years ago.
Once the place to be online, Facebook has evolved into a place for the elderly, with young people drawn to social networks where people express themselves through images and video snippets.
About 62 percent of teens said they use Instagram, owned by Facebook parent Meta, while 59 percent said they use Snapchat, researchers said.
“A quarter of teens who use Snapchat or TikTok say they use those apps almost all the time, and a fifth of teen YouTube users say the same,” the report reads.
Good news for Meta’s business is that its photo and video sharing service, Instagram, was more popular among US teens than it was in the 2014-2015 survey.
Meanwhile, less than a quarter of teens surveyed said they ever used Twitter, the report said.
The study also confirmed what casual observers have suspected: 95 percent of US teens say they have smartphones, while almost as many of them have desktop or laptop computers.
And the proportion of teens who say they’re online almost all the time has nearly doubled to 46 percent compared to survey results from seven years ago, researchers found.
The report was based on a survey of 1,316 U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 conducted from mid-April to early May this year, according to Pew.
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