A survey of US teens on social media: 80% feel closer to friends and 71% like showing creativity; 59% are neutral on its overall impact; girls report more drama
Majorities of teens credit social media with strengthening their friendships and providing support while also noting the emotionally charged side of these platforms
Context & Ripple Effects
This Pew wave sits between two bookends in the outlet's own teen tracking. The 2018 Pew survey of 743 teens found 81% felt more connected and 69% said social media diversified their friend groups — a strongly positive frame. By mid-2022, Pew's usage breakdown showed the audience had consolidated around YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat with Facebook down to 32%, so this new survey measures how teens judge platforms they now treat as default infrastructure.
The headline finding is ambivalence rather than backlash: 59% neutral on overall impact even as 80% credit closer friendships. That neutrality matters because it becomes the baseline for what came after — Pew's 2025 follow-up recorded the share of teens saying social media harms people their age rising from 32% in 2022 to 48%, meaning this survey captured the moment before sentiment tipped.
First-order effects
- Teens themselves hold both views simultaneously: majorities credit friendship and creative expression while girls report more drama, so any single 'good or bad for teens' framing fails against the actual distribution.
- The 59% neutral majority is the operative number for platforms — most teen users neither endorse nor condemn the category, leaving brand perception unusually contestable.
Second-order effects
- The gender split in reported drama tells platforms and their trust-and-safety teams exactly where scrutiny will concentrate; the same skew reappears in Pew's later work, making girls' experience the pressure point for design and moderation choices.
- Parents and policymakers now have a paired dataset — this 2022 baseline against the 2025 harm figures — which converts soft sentiment into a measurable trend advocates can cite when pressing for age-appropriate design changes.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across Pew's waves, teen opinion shifts from connection-positive (2018) through ambivalent (this survey) to harm-majority (2025), giving regulators and platforms a longitudinal evidence base rather than one-off anecdotes.
- Sustained ambivalence among the heaviest users suggests the category's social license rests on perceived peer benefit, not entertainment value — a fragile footing if the harm share keeps climbing.
The trend: US teen sentiment toward social media is drifting from connection-positive to harm-aware across successive Pew survey waves, with girls' experiences leading the deterioration.