Young people turn to a variety of platforms, but YouTube stands out for being used by nearly all teens. Roughly nine-in-ten report ever using it.
Teens widely use three other platforms:
About six-in-ten or more say they use TikTok and Instagram.
A somewhat smaller share say they go on Snapchat (55%).
Fewer use Facebook (31%) and WhatsApp (24%). And no more than about one-in-five say the same of Reddit or X (formerly Twitter).
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Online platform use by demographic groups
Teen use of specific online platforms varies across demographic groups – including when it comes to gender, race and ethnicity, age and household income.
By gender
Teen girls are more likely to use Snapchat and Instagram. For example, 61% of girls say they use Snapchat, compared with 49% of boys.
Meanwhile, boys are more likely to use Reddit (21% vs. 12%) and YouTube (94% vs. 89%).
By race and ethnicity
There are differences in use by race and ethnicity across all the platforms asked about except Reddit. Black teens are more likely than their White or Hispanic peers to use Instagram, TikTok, X, Snapchat and YouTube. For example, 82% of Black teens say they use Instagram. This drops to 69% among Hispanic teens and is even lower for White teens (55%). And Black teens are more likely than Hispanic teens to use Facebook.1
WhatsApp is used by a larger share of Hispanic and Black teens than White teens.
By age
Older teens stand out from younger teens in using nearly every platform we ask about. For instance, three-quarters of 15- to 17-year-olds say they use Instagram, compared with 44% of 13- to 14-year-olds.
YouTube is the only site measured that older and younger teens are equally likely to use.
By household income
Teens in households with lower and middle incomes are more commonly using TikTok and Facebook, a largely similar pattern to previous years.
For instance, 46% of teens living in households earning less than $30,000 a year say they use Facebook. Similarly, 39% of those in households with incomes between $30,000 and $74,999 say the same. However, this drops to 27% among teens in households earning $75,000 or more.
By party
In a pattern seen in previous Center surveys, a larger share of teens who identify as Democrats than Republicans say they use TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and YouTube.
For example, there is a large partisan gap for TikTok: 75% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning teens say they use TikTok, compared with 60% of Republicans and Republican leaners.
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Which chatbots do teens use?
In addition to understanding their overall use, we also asked teens about their use of six specific chatbots.
ChatGPT (59%) is by far the most widely used chatbot and the only one we measured that a majority of teens use.
This is more than twice the rate of the next most commonly used chatbots: Gemini (23%) and Meta AI (20%).
Fewer say they use Copilot,Character.ai and Claude.
By race and ethnicity
Black and Hispanic teens are more likely than their White peers to say they use Gemini and Meta AI.
Black and White teens differ modestly in their use of ChatGPT and Character.ai.
There are no significant differences in use for Copilot or Claude.By age
Teens ages 15 to 17 are more likely than those 13 to 15 to report using ChatGPT and Meta AI.
By household income
ChatGPT use is more common among teens in higher-income households. About six-in-ten teens living in households earning $75,000 or more (62%) say they use it. That compares with 52% of teens living in households earning less than $75,000.
Meanwhile, lower- and middle-income teens are more likely to use Character.ai. Some 14% of teens in households with incomes of less than $75,000 report using it. This is double the rate among teens in households with incomes of $75,000 or more (7%).
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
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