The Pew Research Center released a study on Tuesday that shows how young people are using both social media and AI chatbots.
Teen internet safety has remained a global hot topic, with Australia planning to enforce a social media ban for under-16s starting on Wednesday. The impact of social media on teen mental health has been extensively debated — some studies show how online communities can improve mental health, while other research shows the adverse effects of doomscrolling or spending too much time online. The U.S. surgeon general even called for social media platforms to put warning labels on their products last year.
Pew found that 97% of teens use the internet daily, with about 40% of respondents saying they are “almost constantly online.” While this marks a decrease from last year’s survey (46%), it’s significantly higher than the results from a decade ago, when 24% of teens said they were online almost constantly.
But as the prevalence of AI chatbots grows in the U.S., this technology has become yet another factor in the internet’s impact on American youth.
Image Credits:Pew Research Center
About three in ten U.S. teens are using AI chatbots every day, the Pew study reveals, with 4% saying they use them almost constantly. Fifty-nine percent of teens say they use ChatGPT, which is more than twice as popular as the next two most used chatbots, Google’s Gemini (23%) and Meta AI (20%). Forty-six percent of U.S. teens say that they use AI chatbots at least several times a week, while 36% report not using AI chatbots at all.
Pew’s research also details how race, age, and class impact teen chatbot use.
About 68% of Black and Hispanic teens surveyed said they use chatbots, compared to 58% of white respondents. In particular, Black teens were about twice as likely to use Gemini and Meta AI as white teens.
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“The racial and ethnic differences in teen chatbot use were striking […] but it’s tough to speculate about the reasons behind those differences,” Pew Research Associate Michelle Faverio told TechCrunch. “This pattern is consistent with other racial and ethnic differences we’ve seen in teen technology use. Black and Hispanic teens are more likely than White teens to say they’re on certain social media sites — such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.”
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