SAN FRANCISCO, California: Teenagers in the United States have left Facebook in droves over the past seven years, preferring to spend time on videosharing platforms YouTube and TikTok, according to Pew Research Center survey data released on Wednesday (Thursday in Manila).

TikTok has “emerged as a top social media platform for US teens” while Google-run YouTube “stands out as the most common platform used by teens,” the report’s authors wrote.

Pew’s data comes as Facebook owner Meta is battling TikTok for social media primacy, trying to keep the maximum number of users as part of its multibilliondollar, advertising-driven business.

The report said some 95 percent of the teens surveyed said they use YouTube, compared with 67 percent saying they are TikTok users.

Just 32 percent of teens said they logged on to Facebook, a big drop from the 71 percent who reported being users in a similar survey seven years ago.

Once the place to be online, Facebook has become seen as a venue for older folks, with the young drawn to social networks where people express themselves with pictures and video snippets.

About 62 percent of the teens said they use the photo and video-sharing service Instagram, also owned by Meta, while 59 percent said they used Snapchat, researchers said.

“A quarter of teens who use Snapchat or TikTok say they use these apps almost constantly, and a fifth of teen YouTube users say the same,” the report said.

In a bit of good news for Meta’s business, Instagram was more popular with US teens than it was in the 2014 to 2015 poll.

Meanwhile, less than a quarter of respondents said they ever use Twitter.

The study also confirmed what casual observers may have suspected: 95 percent of US teens said they had smartphones, while nearly as many of them have desktop or laptop computers.

And the share of teens who say they are online almost constantly has nearly doubled to 46 percent when compared to survey results from seven years ago.

The report was based on a survey of 1,316 American teens whose ages range from 13 to 17 and conducted from mid-April to early May.