FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Don’t Believe What Teens Say, They Still Use Facebook

A new Pew Research Center study shows teens use Facebook more often than other social media sites.

​It turns out all the teens who have been telling​ us for years that Faceb​ook isn't cool anymore and nobody ​uses it are full of shit. At least, that's what a new stu​dy from Pew Research Center suggests.

Pew surveyed a sample of 1,060 US kids between the ages of 13 and 17 and found that more teens (41 percent) reported they used Facebook most often compared to other social media sites. Instagram came in second with 20 percent and Snapchat fell in third at 11 percent.

Advertisement

While Pew reports that the youngest cohort (teens aged 13 and 14) was more likely to cite Instagram as their most-often used platform than their older peers, the majority still picked good old-fashioned Facebook as their preferred site.

Of course, one survey of a little over 1,000 kids isn't conclusive in any sense. There have been other studies indicating Facebook has lost its lustre among the high school crowd, like a report from investment bank Piper Jaffray last fall th​at found teen Facebook use had dropped from 72 percent to 45 percent in the past year—and they surveyed 7,200 kids. Even Pew repor​ted in 2013 that teens' interest in Facebook was "waning."

If anything, this study only provides evidence that #teens feel the same way about Facebook that many of us do: we kind of ha​te it, but we can't seem to get rid of it.

Gen Z's current affection for Facebook was only one of the findings from Pew's survey. It also showed that Snapchat isn't as popular for kids from lower-income homes, that 73 percent of teens have a smartphone, and that 24 percent say they are online "almost constantly." But if you have spent any time with a teen recently, that last statistic probably feels surprisingly low.