Pew Research: US Teenagers Are Losing Interest in Facebook

A new survey from the Pew Research Center revealed that American teenagers are losing interest in Facebook.

According to the survey, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat are the most popular social media networks amongst teenagers. Only 51 percent of American teenagers claim that they used Facebook and a tiny minority of just ten percent claim that they use Facebook more than any other social media platform.

This is a significant change in just a few years. When Pew surveyed American teenagers in 2014-2015, 71 percent reported that they used Facebook.

The social media landscape in which teens reside looks markedly different than it did as recently as three years ago. In the Center’s 2014-2015 survey of teen social media use, 71% of teens reported being Facebook users. No other platform was used by a clear majority of teens at the time: Around half (52%) of teens said they used Instagram, while 41% reported using Snapchat.

According to the report, 32 percent of teenagers surveyed said that they use Twitter. Just seven percent said that they use the popular social news aggregation site Reddit. Another nine percent said that they use the “microblogging” site Tumblr. 85 percent of teen respondents said that they use popular video hosting site YouTube. 35 percent of the teens said that they use Snapchat more than any other social media platform.

“The social media environment among teens is quite different from what it was just three years ago,” Pew Researcher Monica Anderson said in the report. “Back then, teens’ social media use mostly revolved around Facebook. Today, their habits revolve less around a single platform. At the same time we’ve seen this shift, teens are more digitally connected than ever.”

Facebook has faced serious issues in 2018. In March, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took out several full-page advertisements in major newspapers across the United States and United Kingdom to apologize for a data scandal that involved the leakage of personal information from millions of users.