An in-depth look at how teens use social media: YouTube is dominant, TikTok is ascendant, Facebook is falling, and Instagram and Snapchat remain important
TikTok has established itself as one of the top online platforms for U.S. teens, while the share of teens who use Facebook has fallen sharply
Context & Ripple Effects
Pew's 2018 survey already showed the direction of travel: YouTube led at 85% while Facebook trailed at just 51% among U.S. teens (the 2018 Pew teen study). The 2022 wave confirms the pattern hardened into a hierarchy — YouTube near-universal at 95%, TikTok surging to 67% and overtaking both Instagram (62%) and Snapchat (59%), with Facebook down to 32%.
The follow-on coverage brackets this finding: a companion write-up of the same survey ran the next day (Pew's full 2022 teen breakdown), and a late-2023 wave shows the ordering largely holding — YouTube 93%, TikTok 63%, Snapchat edging past Instagram, Facebook stuck at 33% (the 2023 Pew teen survey) — making the 2022 report the pivot point where TikTok's ascent became structural rather than anecdotal.
First-order effects
- Facebook's teen reach has collapsed from 51% in 2018 to 32% in 2022, meaning advertisers buying teen audiences on Meta's flagship now reach barely a third of the cohort they could four years earlier.
- TikTok at 67% is now ahead of Instagram and Snapchat among U.S. teens, displacing both as the default short-video destination for the cohort.
Second-order effects
- Instagram and Snapchat are forced to compete for the same teen attention TikTok has consolidated, defending their 62% and 59% shares against an app that entered the top tier only after the 2018 baseline.
- Meta's ad business faces a generational pipeline problem: teens aging into adulthood arrive without Facebook habits, pressuring the company to route youth engagement through Instagram instead.
Third-order effects
- If the 2018-to-2023 trajectory holds, platform loyalty becomes cohort-defined — each generation enters on different apps, and Facebook's user base ages structurally rather than churning back.
- Teen attention consolidating around video-first platforms (YouTube, TikTok) points toward ad spend and creator economies reorganizing around algorithmic video feeds rather than social graphs.
The trend: U.S. teen social media is migrating from social-graph platforms like Facebook toward algorithmic video feeds led by YouTube and TikTok, with each Pew wave since 2018 confirming the same ranking.