Screen teens
A new survey has found that maybe the older generations were right after all: teenagers these days really do spend all of their time on their phones. Nearly half (47%) of teen pollees aged 13-17 years old responded that they were online “almost constantly”. While that share is about the same as last year, it’s almost double the figure recorded for 2014-15 — with a whopping 95% of teens also now reporting having access to a smartphone.
And for anyone wondering exactly how the younger netizens are whiling away their online hours, the majority of teens use several social media apps and sites every single day, including 71% for YouTube, 58% for TikTok, and 51% for Snapchat.
Liked and subscribed
While YouTube remained the firm favorite among teenagers, with 93% using the video site altogether, a small contraction in daily usage from last year was observed across most social media platforms included in the poll — perhaps the result of the screen time limit feature, introduced on iPhones in 2022.
There was one major exception to the downward trend, however: TikTok. The share of teens who identified as “almost constant” users of the Bytedance-owned app increased to 17%, and millennial mainstay Facebook even saw a modest rise among constant users as well. Zuckerberg’s platform still isn’t exactly cool amongst the teenage demographic, however, with total teen FB users plummeting from 71% in 2014-15 to just 33% today.
