By Nathalie Voit
American teenagers are turning to other social media platforms besides Facebook for social connection, a Pew Research Center study found.
The results of the study, released on Aug. 8, show that just one in three teenagers aged 13 to 17 use Facebook. In contrast, in a 2014-15 Pew survey, 71% of teenagers reported using Facebook.
Instead, the report found teenagers nowadays were most excited by up-and-coming platforms like TikTok, which didn’t debut globally until 2018.
At the same time, the share of teens using Instagram and Snapchat has skyrocketed since the original study was launched. While 52% of teenagers and 41% of teenagers reported using Instagram and Snapchat, respectively, in 2014-15, that number grew by 10% and 18% over the last seven or eight years.
Meanwhile, YouTube, which Pew did not include in the original study, was cited by a whopping 95% of participants.
Overall, the top social media platforms cited by respondents in the 2022 Pew social media study were YouTube (mentioned by 95% of teens), TikTok (67%), Instagram (62%), and Snapchat (59%).
Just 32% of participants aged 13 to 17 said they use Facebook.
“There are now well over five strongly positioned social media platforms to endlessly scroll through, and it isn’t sustainable for our minds to compartmentalize nor prioritize our relationship with all of them,” Jules Terpak, a Gen Z content creator, told TechCrunch.
“For the sake of time and sanity, people have to eliminate platforms that begin to lack a value-add incentive,” Terpak said, referring to Facebook’s longstanding decline among young adults.
