Pew found 16% of US teens say they use TikTok constantly

What was announced or recorded

On 12 December 2024, Pew Research Center published Teens, Social Media and Technology 2024. Pew states it surveyed 1,391 US teens aged 13 to 17 living with a parent, fielded 18 September to 10 October 2024 through Ipsos using KnowledgePanel, a probability-based panel recruited independently of the survey topic, with results weighted by age, gender, race and ethnicity, and household income.

What the documents establish

The report states that 90% of US teens say they use YouTube and roughly 60% say they use TikTok, with about 60% of TikTok users visiting daily and 16% saying they use it almost constantly. It records that nearly half of all teens describe themselves as online almost constantly, up from 24% a decade earlier on Pew's own trend line, and that TikTok use splits by political affiliation of the household, 73% among teens from Democratic-leaning households against 52% from Republican-leaning ones, well above the 33% of all US adults who told Pew's companion Americans' Social Media Use survey that they use TikTok. These are self-reported frequency categories, not logged session data; 'almost constantly' is the respondent's own label, and the survey asks about using the platform in general, not about watching any particular kind of content on it, so it cannot say what share of that near-constant use is spent on vertical drama rather than anything else TikTok carries.

Announced versus delivered

As with any completed survey wave, there is no plan to hold against a result here; what matters is the gap between what was asked and what a reader might want it to answer. The document delivers a reliable, panel-based estimate of how many US teens say they use TikTok and how often, which is a precondition for arguing that vertical drama has a teen audience; it does not deliver any confirmation that teen TikTok use includes drama content specifically, since that question was never put to respondents.

What to watch

Editorially, the number worth tracking is whether Pew's future waves add a content-category question alongside platform and frequency, since only that would let a reader move from 'teens use TikTok often' to any claim about teens and vertical drama specifically; until then the connection is inference, not measurement.

• Does 'almost constantly' describe measured session time, or is it the respondent's own self-assessed label?
• Is a platform-frequency finding being extended into a content-genre claim the survey never asked about?
• Does the panel's recruitment method (probability-based, not opt-in) support the generalisation being drawn from it?

Pew's teen survey is strong, generalisable evidence about platform use and frequency among US 13-to-17-year-olds; it is silent on vertical drama by design, and any claim linking the two has to come from a different, content-specific source.