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Teens Never Fell in Love with Twitter

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The “Teens, social media and technology 2022” survey conducted by Pew Research in the USA finds that teens (13-17 years) that ‘ever’ use Twitter has gone down from 33% in 2014-15 to 23% 2022. The term “ever use” means they “hardly use at all” in the context of the survey. Percentage of teens that “constantly use” Twitter would be much much lower, in single digit I would guess. We can extrapolate the guesstimate from their earlier report. In 2019 they reported that only 10% of the adult Twitter users are the “most active” (read it here).  If we are to be observer similar proportion, total Teens that are most active on Twitter is 2.3%.

There are several interesting observations regarding other social media platforms, which I will cover on other posts. I focus on Twitter to focus on specific questions that immediately came into my mind while reading the statistics. In no particular order:

  • Is Twitter use driven by adults (non-teens) whose first experience with social media is through Twitter? 
  • If Twitter is dominantly associated with adults from the very start, what characteristics of the platform are indicative of such a trend? Do we see this on other platforms, non-digital technologies of the past such as radio and television, or are we just reading too much into correlations?  
  • Can we confidently claim that success of technologies, social media platforms or gadgets, is not necessarily dependent on whether they are popular among teens or not when they are starting out? Or is Twitter just a blip?

There is a caveat to the relatively small number of most active Twitter users in the teen demographic. 2.3% can be interpreted in two ways. If we compare it with the most popular platforms, which are TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube, the number is significantly small. About one in five visit YouTube regularly according to the same survey. This can be a seen as a cause of optimism that the teens are not wasting their time on hate and abuse speeches, which is what Twitter is popularly associated with. On the other hand, 2.3% of a large number is still a large number. 

And there is the case of teens and ‘productive use’ of their time. It would not be surprising to see and hear comments such as “they might not be that involved in propagating hate and abuse, but they are still wasting their time on frivolous pursuits in other platforms”. It would be interesting to know what activities/use have been associated with “productive use” and not-“wasting time” since the dawn of electronic technologies. Reading books can be taken as non-productive use if what is read does not produce a measurable outcome. I have been asked a related question by my relatives: "what use is reading (or any form of learning) when it has neither increased income nor improved social standing". Before I go into a tangential discussion, I end this post with a disclaimer. As always, take the findings from a singular survey with a grain of salt.

 

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