Pew Research Center: ‘Teens, Social Media, and Technology 2022’

Emily A. Vogels, Risa Gelles-Watnick, and Navid Massarat, writing for Pew Research Center:

The landscape of social media is ever-changing, especially among teens who often are on the leading edge of this space. A new Pew Research Center survey of American teenagers ages 13 to 17 finds TikTok has rocketed in popularity since its North American debut several years ago and now is a top social media platform for teens among the platforms covered in this survey. Some 67% of teens say they ever use TikTok, with 16% of all teens saying they use it almost constantly. Meanwhile, the share of teens who say they use Facebook, a dominant social media platform among teens in the Center’s 2014-15 survey, has plummeted from 71% then to 32% today.

YouTube tops the 2022 teen online landscape among the platforms covered in the Center’s new survey, as it is used by 95% of teens. TikTok is next on the list of platforms that were asked about in this survey (67%), followed by Instagram and Snapchat, which are both used by about six-in-ten teens. After those platforms come Facebook with 32% and smaller shares who use Twitter, Twitch, WhatsApp, Reddit and Tumblr.

YouTube has no peer. It’s less like a specific content destination and more like an entire form of media unto itself. To put it in old media terms, YouTube isn’t like a cable TV channel — it’s like cable TV itself, something that dominated teenage attention for many decades.

This trends bodes poorly for Meta’s next decade, and has nothing to do with App Tracking Transparency.

★ Thursday, 11 August 2022