A national survey found half of US teens online almost constantly

The short answer

Pew Research Center's Teens, Social Media and Technology 2023 report found that YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram dominate US teenagers' platform use, and that about half of teens describe themselves as online almost constantly. A single number like that is a snapshot from one sample in one autumn; the 2024 wave of the same survey shows how much it moves year to year.

What the evidence says

The 2023 survey questioned 1,453 US teenagers aged 13 to 17 in an online panel run by Ipsos, fielded between 26 September and 23 October 2023. It found roughly nine in ten teens use YouTube, with majorities also using TikTok (63%), Snapchat (60%) and Instagram (59%); Facebook use has fallen to 33%, from 71% a decade earlier. Forty-nine percent of teens said they use the internet almost constantly, roughly double the 24% who said so in 2014-2015. TikTok had the highest rate of near-constant use among named platforms, at 17%, with notable differences by ethnicity and gender.

The 2024 wave, published a year later from a fresh sample of 1,391 teens fielded through Ipsos's KnowledgePanel, found 47% online almost constantly, described by Pew as broadly stable rather than a further rise. Facebook ticked up slightly to 32%; Instagram's near-constant use rose from 8% to 12%. Comparing single years risks over-reading normal sampling movement as a trend.

For context

These figures describe self-reported perception and platform-level habits, not minutes logged by an app or the content teenagers see while using it. Two teenagers who both report using a platform almost constantly may be having very different experiences, one messaging close friends, another passively scrolling. The survey is a well-documented, methodologically transparent tracker, but a single wave should be read as one point in a series, not a verdict on any single platform's effect.

A practical next step

You could use these figures as a prompt for a specific conversation rather than a general worry, asking your teenager which platform they would say they use almost constantly, and what they are doing on it during that time, rather than assuming national averages describe your household.

• Which platform, if any, would my teenager say they check almost constantly, and why that one?
• Has that habit changed since last year, and does my teenager notice the change themselves?
• Does near-constant use come with anything they would want help changing, or does it not bother them?

Read together, the two waves are a reminder that survey percentages are estimates from a sample, useful for spotting broad shifts such as Facebook's long decline, but not precise enough to treat a one-point year-on-year move as news.