A new Pew report about teens and social media reveals something you probably could already guess: Parents are more concerned that teens are watching too much TikTok than teens are.
Among respondents, 44% of parents say their teen spends too much time on TikTok, while only 28% of teens feel the same. Breaking news: Water is wet!
At this point, we know — or feel like we know — a lot about how young people are experiencing the internet. Adults (and teens themselves) are reasonably concerned about the effects of social media on young people’s mental health. Meta and Google just lost a landmark legal battle that found them liable for getting a young woman addicted to Instagram and YouTube. (Both of the companies said last month that they would appeal.)
But that’s not the only story; plenty of teens happily use social media and find it enriches their lives. This leaves us with a big question about how they’re using it, and what they do and don’t like.
Pew asked both teens (ages 13 to 17) and their parents in the U.S. about their opinions on the three most popular social platforms for teens.
Snapchat is most popular for messaging, but also for bullying
Some of this was very straightforward, like the top reason for using all these apps was “entertainment,” and the least popular reason was “keeping up with politics or political issues.” As an adult, I can relate.
What stuck out to me was how much Snapchat is used for messaging. Of teens, 57% said they message people daily on Snapchat — 41% said several times a day. In comparison, only 24% of teens do daily messaging on TikTok, and 34% on Instagram.
Snapchat also beat the others in having teens actually post to it — 28% said they share or post daily on Snapchat, compared with 16% on Instagram and 19% on TikTok.
The reason is easy to understand: Snapchat is for direct connections; TikTok and Instagram are more public-facing (and therefore intimidating to post to), or for passive watching of professional creators’ content. Snapchat is for people you know in real life; Instagram and TikTok are for strangers.
It follows that Snapchat was the app that most teens said had a positive effect on their friendships (44%). The downside was that Snapchat was also the place where teens experienced the highest rate (27%) of bullying or harassment, like someone spreading a rumor about them or calling them names.
(Although teens may love Snapchat, the company on Wednesday announced layoffs of about 16% of its global workforce.)
So what does this all mean?
Instagram’s leaders have been very clear in the last year or more that they see messaging as the future. Several new product features have rolled out to encourage direct messaging, like a way to share a Reels feed with a friend (a dangerous premise, but I love it).
TikTok is less messaging-focused, but there are some signals it would like to change that: I’ve noticed a new feature where when you accidentally tap in the caption area of a video, it DMs it to a mutual friend (yikes!).
Snapchat’s users are mostly younger people, so parents and adults aren’t as familiar with it as Instagram and TikTok. But Snapchat is so crucial to how teens communicate with each other that perhaps parents should get themselves more familiar with it. It certainly seems that Meta and TikTok would like to learn from Snapchat, too.
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