Amid national concerns about technology’s impact on youth, many American teens are as digitally connected as ever. Most use social media and have a smartphone, and nearly half say they are online almost constantly, according to a Pew Research Center survey of US teens ages 13 to 17 conducted September 18 through October 10, 2024.
A decade-long surge in constant connectivity
Nearly all US teens, 96 percent, report using the internet every day, and the share who are online “almost constantly” has nearly doubled since a decade ago, when it stood at 24 percent, compared with 46 percent today.
Nearly all teens, 95 percent, have or have access to a smartphone. Teens also have access to desktop or laptop computers (88%), gaming consoles (83%), and tablets (70%) at home. The combination of near-universal device ownership and always-on connectivity has reshaped how adolescents organize their social lives, leisure time, and daily routines.
The pattern echoes findings from other recent Pew work on how digital immersion intersects with family life. A separate Pew survey found that 52 percent of full-time working parents say their job makes it harder to be a good parent, a pressure that researchers note is compounded when screens compete for attention at home.
YouTube holds, but the platform map is shifting
YouTube tops the list of online platforms covered by the survey. Nine in ten teens report using the site, slightly down from 95 percent in 2022. About 73 percent visit YouTube daily.
TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat remain widely used among teens. Roughly six in ten say they use TikTok and Instagram, and 55 percent say the same for Snapchat.
Facebook and X use have steeply declined over the past decade. Today, 32 percent of teens say they use Facebook, down from 71 percent in 2014 to 2015, though the share has remained stable in recent years. Only 17 percent of teenagers say they use X (formerly Twitter), about half the share who said so a decade ago (33 percent), and down from 23 percent in 2022. Reddit held steady at 14 percent. Threads, launched by parent company Meta in 2023, was asked about for the first time in this survey; only 6 percent of teens report using it.
Teens know the numbers, and many are uneasy
A separate Pew Research Center report on how teens and parents approach screen time, based on an online survey of 1,453 US teens and parents conducted September 26 through October 23, 2023, found that more teens say they spend too much time on their phone or social media than say they do not spend enough. Thirty-eight percent of teens acknowledged spending too much time on their smartphones.
Most teens at least sometimes feel happy and peaceful when they do not have their phone, but 44 percent say this makes them anxious. That split, roughly equal parts relief and distress at the prospect of disconnecting, signals how deeply the devices have become embedded in daily emotional life rather than simply functioning as communication tools.
Views on this differ by gender. Teen girls are more likely than boys to say they spend too much time on their smartphone (44 percent vs. 33 percent) or on social media.
The findings land against a broader backdrop of research showing that digital immersion is also reshaping how young people build relationships offline. A separate AARP study found only 22 percent of Americans have an intergenerational close friend, a metric researchers partly attribute to social life increasingly migrating onto platforms that reinforce age-segmented feeds.
What the survey methodology shows
Pew Research Center conducted the December 2024 study to better understand teens’ use of digital devices, social media, and other online platforms. The Center conducted an online survey of 1,391 US teens from September 18 to October 10, 2024, through Ipsos.
Ipsos recruited the teens via their parents, who were part of its KnowledgePanel, a probability-based web panel recruited primarily through national, random sampling of residential addresses. The survey was weighted to be representative of US teens ages 13 to 17 who live with their parents by age, gender, race and ethnicity, household income, and other categories.
The December 2024 teens and social media report provides the most comprehensive recent baseline for understanding how adolescent screen habits have evolved, and where the next generation’s digital defaults are now set.
