Pew Research study of US teen internet usage finds 85% say they use YouTube, 72% use Instagram, 69% use Snapchat, while only 51% say they use Facebook
nearly half online ‘almost constantly’ Larry Magid / Mercury News : Magid: Facebook slips, Snapchat grows among teens Alex Perry / International Business Times : Once Dominant, Facebook Falls Behind Snapchat, YouTube As Teens' Favorite Social Network Avery Hartmans / Business Insider : Nearly 50% of teens in the US say they're now online ‘almost constantly,’ according to new research Karissa Bell / Mashable : Teens are breaking up with Facebook faster than we thought Tweets: Kate Hinds / @katehinds : Please join me on FB, where my peers and I are having robust discussions about caftans and our 401(k) accounts http://slate.com/... Logan Dobson / @logandobson : why i've been taking the “snap is dead” takes less than seriously. look at that “use most often” number http://twitter.com/... David Carroll / @profcarroll : Would love to see data revealing what percentage of Americans realize that Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp http://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Pew's spring 2018 work already hinted at the split: a March survey of 18-24 year olds showed Snapchat at 78% and Instagram at 71% among young adults, with YouTube near-universal. The new teen numbers sharpen that into a generational break — Facebook, still the default adult network, sits at 51% among teens while YouTube (85%), Instagram (72%) and Snapchat (69%) lead.
What makes this data point durable is how cleanly the later waves confirmed it: by the 2022 Pew deep dive Facebook had fallen to 32% of teens and TikTok had entered at 67%, and the 2023 wave showed the same shape with roughly a third of teens on these platforms 'almost constantly'.
First-order effects
- Facebook loses its claim on the next cohort — a majority of US teens no longer use the platform that defined social networking for their parents, while its own property Instagram holds second place at 72%.
- YouTube consolidates its position as the default teen platform at 85%, and Pew's finding that nearly half of teens are online 'almost constantly' makes that attention the most valuable inventory in teen media.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers chasing teen reach follow the migration, forcing Facebook to defend via Instagram rather than Facebook itself — and internal documents later showed Instagram ran an aggressive, yearslong campaign to win back teen users, confirming the 2018 slide was treated as an existential threat inside the company.
- Snapchat's 69% teen share gives it a defensible youth niche to sell against Facebook's aging base, while the vacuum Facebook leaves becomes the opening TikTok exploits by 2022.
Third-order effects
- Teen surveys become the industry's leading indicator of platform aging: the 2018 pattern — Facebook down, video-first apps up — predicted the 2022-2023 collapse to ~32% and the rise of TikTok, establishing cohort tracking as the standard way to read a network's future.
- If the pattern holds, social media stratifies by generation rather than converging on one winner, with each cohort anchored to the platforms it adopted first and incumbents forced to buy or build successors (as Facebook did with Instagram) rather than revive the parent brand.
The trend: US teen usage surveys are tracing a generational turnover in social media, where each Pew wave since 2018 shows Facebook shedding young users to video-first platforms — YouTube first, then TikTok.