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The latest on teens’ social media use

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YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat are US 13-17 year-olds’ top social media picks now – at 85%, 72% and 69%, respectively. That’s according to the Pew Research Center’s just-released “Teens, Social Media & Technology 2018.” [The percentages add up to more than 100% because, as is well known, teens use multiple social media apps and services, often simultaneously.] Filling out the top 7 were Facebook in the 4th position (at 51%), followed by Twitter (32%), Tumblr (9%) and Reddit (7%).

Pew Research chartSnapchat is No. 1, though, for frequency of use. When Pew asked its respondents what social media they use most often, 35% said Snapchat, as opposed to 32% YouTube and 15% Instagram. That might have something to do with the fact that teens use Snapchat as much for chatting (which is very much like texting, obviously a very high-frequency tech activity) as anything else.

Snapchat streaks could be a bit of a factor too. They’re a kind of game that’s unique to Snapchat whereby friends will send each other a snap every day and see how long they can keep it going (streaks can be entertaining, transactional or stressful, depending on the people involved and how they’re feeling that day; for more, see BusinessInsider.com). Those two factors are just speculation on my part; the important takeaway is that – because each social media service has unique features and each user has their own uses and intentions (which can vary by time of day, even!), it’s hard to generalize about its use, and solid research like this is the best possible way to get the big picture.

Incidentally, a Snap spokesperson just told us that 13-17 year-olds aren’t Snapchat’s largest age group. They actually come in at third place in the app at 20% of Snapchat’s users, after 18-24 year-olds (37%) and 25-34 year-olds (27%). People 35+ are the app’s smallest cohort at 16%.

Some more interesting highlights from this report:

  • Smartphones: “95% of teens [97% of girls, 93% of boys] now report they have a smartphone or access to one,” up 22% over Pew’s last survey in 2014-’15. Income is hardly a factor: 93% of 13-14 YOs in <$30k/year households and 93% in households with incomes of $30k-74,999 “have or have access at home to a smartphone,” while 97% of teens in households of $75,000+ do.
  • Computers: 88% of teens have or have access to a laptop or desktop at home.
  • Use levels: “45%…say they are online on a near-constant basis,” up from 24% in the last survey.
  • Gaming’s huge: Not surprisingly, based on past Pew research, 90% of US teens – 97% of boys, 83% of girls – play digital games somehow (computer, console or phone), and 84% “have access to a game console at home”; 85% of teens in households earning $30,000/year a year have a game console at home, up from 67% in 2014-2015.
  • Different platforms: Teen use of Facebook has dropped 20% since Pew’s last report, where, at 71%, it was No. 1 among US teens. The % hasn’t changed much at Twitter and Tumblr. Pew didn’t even ask teens about YouTube in the last survey (possibly because they and society in general didn’t see it as social media). Reddit wasn’t in the last survey either.
  • Use diversifying: No single platform dominates teens’ social media use. Facebook used to.
  • Income: A big change over 10 years ago was that “lower-income teens are more likely to gravitate toward Facebook.”
  • Gender: Girls are more likely than boys to say they use Snapchat most (42% vs. 29%), and boys YouTube more (39% vs. 25%).
  • Race/ethnicity: Snapchat is used more often by white teens (41%) than Hispanic (29%) or black (23%) teens; “black teens are more likely than whites to identify Facebook as their most used site (26% vs. 7%).”
  • Teens’ views on impacts: Pew reports “no clear consensus among teens about the effect that social media has on the lives of young people today”; the largest percentage (45%) said the effect has been “neither positive nor negative,” 31% says the effect is mostly positive, 24% mostly negative.

Pew gave the respondents themselves a chance to describe how social media affected them positively or negatively. Please check out the report for the responses that the study’s authors chose to highlight.

Media literacy opp for your students & you

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Apps chart
Snippet of a chart titled “10 apps teens are using that parents need to know” (maybe last year?)

This week we were alerted to a teens’ top apps chart posted on a principal’s page on Facebook. It featured the chart in this thoughtful blog post by educator April Requard in New Mexico.

The chart, “10 Apps Teens Are Using that Parents Need to Know,” represents a great media literacy education opp for educators as well as their students. It surprised us that it was making the rounds of educators’ social media circles because, just at first glance, it seemed out of date.

For example, where is Snapchat on this list? we wondered. Last year “83% of US teens age 12-17 use[d] Snapchat at least once a month,” according to the latest figures available from eMarketer. Other examples: the France-based “Yellow” app is now “Yubo”; Latvia-based ASKfm is on life support and has few US users of any age; and China-based Musical.ly (popular among preteens and young teens in the US) and Calif.-based AfterSchool are not on it. Ontario-based Kik Messenger, also missing from this list, is huge with US teens in some states. As for Whisper, TechCrunch reported last summer that every member of Whisper’s board had stepped down and it had laid off 20% of its staff, so it’s not clear how popular it still is with teens.

We highly recommended that educators and parents searching for the latest information on apps students use bring along plenty of critical thinking. First, look for a source, a date and methodology for any chart, list or infographic. What age or grade levels and which geographic area does it represent – the entire U.S., for example? We couldn’t find that information here, so we went to the source. April kindly got back to us right away, writing that her chart was based on recent research in the App Store and talking with middle school students where she is in New Mexico. So this chart does not represent all US 13-17 year-olds as some viewers might think. She also told us that it was, understandably, really hard to narrow the list down to 10, so she consciously left Snapchat out, figuring all parents and teachers who saw the chart would know how much teens like that app. Good to know.

The thing is, teens’ use of social media varies from school to school and especially region to region. It’s really interesting to see what apps students in one school or district use the most, but those choices don’t necessarily represent your students’ top picks.

So here’s what would be truly relevant to you and your students: media literacy you co-develop. Put together a “focus group” of students at your school, or one that represents several middle and high schools in your district. Maybe it’s your student leaders or any class that uses digital media a lot. Tell them the group’s comments will be anonymous wherever shared. Ask them, based on their research as well as their own experience with social media, what their top 10 apps are. Since tech use is so individual and variable, based on local preferences, they and their readers will learn more if they go beyond their own social media experience. Be sure they consider the above questions about date and demographics in their research and include all the apps students use most, not just social ones (e.g., the Weather app is often a favorite). Extra credit for annotating the list – explaining what they like about each app. It would also be interesting to know what apps or services they feel play host to the most negative or harmful behavior and why. This can easily (ideally) be an annual project, because everybody will benefit from keeping the list current.

So there you have a solid new media literacy lesson that will benefit all participants because current and relevant to your school community. We would LOVE to hear what they turn up, if you’d post it here or email us via info[at]icanhelpline.org.

Clearer picture of cyberbullying: Research

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GKO logoThere’s growing consensus among researchers in many countries, including ours, that “cyberbullying” isn’t the most useful term for online hurtful behavior and may be inhibiting what we can learn from young people about what’s harmful to them – that we need to find out from youth themselves what hurts them and to what degree it happens online.

The latest example of that, by Global Kids Online, spanned multiple countries – Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Montenegro, the Philippines, Serbia and South Africa – with surveys of 9-17 year-olds in those countries.

What actually upsets them?

The researchers first asked them if they’d experienced “something upsetting” online in the past year before asking anything more specific, like “hurtful peer behavior” (“so as not to put ideas in their heads,” they write). Across all the countries, 14-36% had seen something upsetting, which could be anything from violence in news reports to harassment to sexually explicit content, depending on how each child’s defined “upsetting.” The number was much higher in Argentina (78%), but so were the respondents’ ages (13-17 only, not 9-17), suggesting a correlation between age and exposure to negativity.

Then young respondents were asked how upsetting the experience was, and, for example in Montenegro, of the 5% of 7-19 year-old Internet users who’d encountered something upsetting in those 12 months, 36% (of that 5%) were “fairly” or “very” upset by what they’d experienced.

The researchers then asked about hurtful peer behavior both online and offline, to get a sense of the connection between online and offline harassment (see below about U.S. researchers’ effort to do that). Overall – online and offline –12-36% of 9-17 YOs across all eight countries had experienced hurtful peer behavior in the past year, while only 1-11% had experienced it online in the past year. This tracks with U.S. research, which has found that young people still experience more offline peer harassment than the online version (see this on the latest from our National Academies). As for what constitutes “hurtful behavior,” the respondents were asked about everything from “nasty or hurtful messages” (aimed at themselves or someone else), feeling excluded or left out, being threatened, and having one’s personal information or password used by someone.

Similar questions here in the U.S.

This report reminds me of similar work done in 2015 at University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center, which wanted to get at the impacts of online vs. offline harassment (and didn’t even use the term “cyberbullying”). The authors found that about a third (34%) of U.S. youth – in this study 10-20 year-olds – had experienced harassment of some kind over the previous year, 54% of it involving no technology, 15% involving technology (only) and 31% both in person and online. Contrary to what we all hear in the news so much, the negative emotional impact of online-only harassment is “significantly lower” than the in-person kind, the CCRC researchers found. The U.S. respondents found the harassment most distressful or hurtful when it was both offline and online.

It’s clear there’s still no consensus about either the definition or the value of the term “cyberbullying” – and, as the Global Kids Online authors write, the global confusion about it has been “exacerbated by mass media that generally promote alarming statistics without inquiring into definitions….”

So we can be thankful that scholars keep questioning it. It seems to me Profs. Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin at the Cyberbullying Research Center use a term the public recognizes in order to spread awareness of solid academic research on hurtful online behavior and its effects. They too have given careful thought to terminology – see this page in their site that pulls together a lot of thinking on the subject. Scroll down to “What is cyberbullying?” to zoom in, where they, like Global Kids Online, say that adults’ terms and definitions may not be useful when talking with young people about what about their online experiences does – and doesn’t – hurt.

When they survey students, Patchin and Hinduja write, “we define cyberbullying in a way that we feel is more relevant to their everyday experiences. Specifically, we say that ‘cyberbullying is when someone repeatedly makes fun of another person online or repeatedly picks on another person through email or text message or when someone posts something online about another person that they don’t like.” And, as do the Global Kids Online researchers, “we also ask about specific behaviors that might constitute cyberbullying (such as: hurtful comments, threats, rumors, pictures, or videos posted or circulated online).”

So we’re making progress, and researchers are honoring a fundamental right of young people: to be consulted on issues that affect them.

FB’s Messenger Kids: What it means for schools

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FB mKIDS screenshotFacebook’s launch of Messenger Kids is a game-changer for families with kids under 13 – and not just because it’s from Facebook. It’s a game-changer because it’s not yet another parental control tool; it’s a social media learning tool – for parents as well as kids (probably kids at the younger end of the 6-12 age range of this first version of the product). So it’s for digital-age parenting training as well as social media training – especially as FB rolls it out internationally, in countries where kids aren’t already using Snapchat and Musical.ly. Even here in the U.S., though, it’s a great tool for families’ inter-generational communication (grandparents will be learning and enjoying the visual kind more and more from their grandchildren).

It’s also a game-changer for schools. Because the more support parents get in working with their elementary school-aged children on and in social media, the more support schools will get in addressing behavioral problems involving social media – any social media, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter or Kik messenger. Because despite COPPA (the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) and like or not, a heck of a lot of kids under 13 are using social media. And because of COPPA, somewhat ironically, parents and young children have not had many chances to dive in, learn and practice “swimming” in social media together – one of the best ways for kids (the lucky ones with socially competent, engaged parents) to learn social competency in digital media. Facebook Messenger Kids is fully COPPA-compliant social media for kids under 13 – social media their parents sign them up for.

How it works

  • It’s a basic messenger app: Not much different from Facebook Messenger itself, it’s a texting, or messaging, app that kids and their friends, parents and relatives can use to chat in text or video.
  • It’s simple – nothing hard for digitally challenged adults to use (if your colleagues are, get your student leaders to teach them how to use Facebook Messenger).
  • It’s built with kids in mind, appealing to their love of visual communication. It includes a camera for photos, videos and videochat; tools like emojis, stickers, masks; and a drawing tool to get creative with those photos and videos.
  • It’s a positive learning tool, not a response to a decade of scary headlines about young social media users. It puts parents in the driver’s seat, giving them the chance to bring their values into their kids’ online social experiences. The other thing I like is that it prepares kids to be in the driver’s seat, for example by teaching them how to report inappropriate content and mean behavior they experience in the app.

Key safety features

In case your students’ parents have questions about it, it might help you to know about Messenger Kids’s safety features:

  • Parents do the set-up and approve everyone on a child’s contact list, and this works both ways: the parents of the child being added to their child’s Contacts approve their child as well.
  • There are no ads, no in-app purchases and no sharing of kids’ data with other apps on their devices.
  • It has its own specialized kid content moderation team at Facebook.
  • The app, in effect, teaches kids how to report harassment and inappropriate content by giving them popup feedback, and – through parents’ Facebook accounts – it keeps parents informed of how that’s going.
  • Parents get notifications of kid activity, including when kids report problems, within their (the parents’) Facebook accounts.
  • Content doesn’t go away and can’t be deleted, so parents can check their children’s devices to find out what’s going on.
  • App time, bedtime and other controls will be tested with users and likely added as the product rolls out.

You may be thinking, “And how does this help if my students are already using Snapchat, Musical.ly, Instagram, etc.? Well, they don’t typically use those apps with their parents and other caring adults in their lives. Having at least one tool for communications with parents, sibs, aunts, grandparents, etc., is social learning that will have impact on their use of other social media tools – and every little bit of online social-emotional learning helps, right? It’s not a quick fix (what is, right?!), but this is a positive step forward for the whole school community too.

For more on Kids Messenger (from a family tech perspective), see this post (with links to other coverage) at our founder’s blog NetFamilyNews.org.