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Facebook claims 52% daily usage while TikTok hits 24%, suggesting clear dominance. But Pew's survey measures visits, not time spent. That distinction reshapes everything about platform power, ad economics, and which apps actually own user attention.
On paper, Facebook still looks like the king of American social media. In the latest Pew Research “Americans’ Social Media Use 2025” report 71 % of U.S. adults say they use the platform. TikTok reaches 37 %. About half of adults say they go on Facebook every day. Roughly a quarter say the same for TikTok.
If you stop there, the story sounds simple. Facebook gets more people in the door, and more of them show up daily. Roughly three quarters of its users are daily visitors. TikTok converts closer to two thirds. Facebook looks like the stronger habit.
The catch is what Pew actually measures. The survey asks whether people “visit or use” each platform, and how often that happens. It does not ask how long they stay, what they watch, or whether they scroll in silence while the TV is on. A three second notification check and a forty minute video binge both count as one visit.
Once you remember that, Facebook’s apparent dominance looks flatter. The platform remains the place people feel they should open each day. It is not always where they actually spend most of their screen time.
Key Takeaways
• Pew's survey measures platform visits, not time spent, making Facebook's 52% daily usage misleading compared to TikTok's actual engagement depth.
• Age stratification fragments social media into separate ecosystems: Instagram and TikTok dominate under-30s while Facebook and YouTube maintain cross-generational reach.
• TikTok grew from 33% to 37% adult reach during 2024-2025 despite Supreme Court restrictions, showing user behavior largely ignores policy debates.
• YouTube reaches 84% of adults with minimal demographic variation, making it the most widely used platform with relatively little regulatory scrutiny.
Facebook and YouTube are the only services that clear two big thresholds at once. A clear majority of adults use them at all, and about half of adults say they use each at least once a day. In Pew’s latest numbers, 84 %of Americans say they use YouTube, 71 percent say they use Facebook. Around 52 percent of adults go on Facebook daily. Forty-eight percent do the same for YouTube. Twenty-four percent say they are daily TikTok users. Ten percent say they use X every day.
Those figures make Facebook look like a tank that keeps rolling regardless of fashion cycles. It is on more phones, and more people tap the icon at least once in a given day. As a headline metric, daily reach still flatters the old blue app.
Look at how people actually behave inside those apps, and the hierarchy starts to flip. Third party time-use panels and industry estimates put TikTok roughly in the fifty-minutes-a-day range for the average U.S. user. Facebook and Instagram sit nearer to half an hour. A platform that fewer adults use, and that they open less often, is now where the heaviest sessions happen.
That gap matters for the business side. Ad buyers are not paying for the number of times someone pokes an icon. They are paying for stretches of real attention. What they watch is simple. Did people stay long enough for the ad to run. Did they hear it. Did they end up doing anything about it. Those outcomes follow minutes watched and how people are actually leaning into a screen, not raw visit counts.
Facebook understands that reality. It has spent the past two years stuffing feeds with Reels, often from creators users never chose to follow, in a direct attempt to stretch each session. The product is trying to pivot from “clear the notifications and leave” to “stay and watch a run of short videos”.
Pew cannot tell you whether that pivot works. Its questions are too blunt for that. What they do capture is something else. Facebook is still extraordinarily good at getting people to drop in. TikTok is better at holding them once they arrive.
Most people do not think about product strategy when they open Facebook. They are handling errands. A parent checks the school’s photo group, replies to a message in a local buy-nothing community, accepts an invitation to a neighborhood event. Small chores, repeated many times.
Facebook has been engineered to produce exactly that rhythm. Notifications, badges, and red dots pile up across groups, pages, events, and private messages. The platform gives you dozens of reasons to “just look quickly” every day. For a large share of adults in their thirties, forties, and fifties, Facebook is as much a civic noticeboard as a social space.
TikTok feels different from the first frame. There is no feed of status updates from friends. Open the app and it immediately fills the screen with video. Every swipe is a signal. The system constantly refines its sense of what you like, then hands you more of it. For many younger users, TikTok is less a place to look up people they know and more a personalised TV channel that never ends.
That simple difference creates two distinct kinds of “daily user”. One person dips into Facebook three times a day for ninety seconds at a time. Another sits with TikTok once, but does not look up again for half an hour. On a survey sheet they both show up as “daily usage”. For an advertiser trying to work out where to spend money, the second user is worth far more.
Look at the age tables in Pew’s report and one pattern jumps out. Once you lump everything together under the heading “social media”, you blur most of what actually matters.
Among adults under 30, roughly eight in ten say they use Instagram. Among those 65 and older, not even one in five does. TikTok is tilted even more sharply toward the young. Close to half of 18- to 29-year-olds describe themselves as daily users. Only a sliver of seniors say the same.
YouTube and Facebook are the only platforms that reach a majority of people in every age group. Even there the pattern is uneven. Younger adults are more likely to be on YouTube and to treat it as a daily habit. Facebook’s core strength lies in the 30-to-64 band, where more than half of people say they check it every day. Usage is lower among the youngest adults, even if it remains substantial.
This split shapes the money side in subtle ways. Instagram and TikTok dominate the screens of people who spend much of their free time online and who drive music, fashion, and meme culture. Many of them have less income to spare. Older users on Facebook and YouTube might watch fewer short clips, but they have houses, cars, and retirement plans to spend on.
The result shows up in revenue. Meta can still earn more advertising money per U.S. user than TikTok, despite TikTok’s intensity among the young. Facebook’s broad, older base is less glamorous than TikTok’s teen and twenty-something crowd. It is still extremely valuable.
All of this also muddies simple claims about market power. Ask whether Meta dominates “social media”, and the answer depends on which slice of the population you care about. Under 30, Instagram and TikTok sit at the center of attention in a way Facebook no longer does. Over 50, Facebook and YouTube still feel like basic utilities. Regulators who treat social platforms as one big interchangeable market are describing a world that does not exist any more.
TikTok’s adoption curve in the United States is remarkable for one reason. It kept rising while the service sat in the middle of a constitutional fight.
In 2021, about one in five U.S. adults told Pew they used the app. By early 2023, that figure had already risen into the low thirties. In the latest survey, it lands a few points higher again. Growth has slowed a little, but there is no sign of a collapse.
Those extra users arrived while lawmakers tried to push the app out of the country. In the spring of 2024, Congress passed a law that forced ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to sell or lose access to the U.S. market. At the start of 2025, the Supreme Court backed that approach.
Around the January deadline, TikTok briefly disappeared for American users and dropped out of the major app stores, only to return after then president-elect Donald Trump signalled he would delay full enforcement and look for a negotiated solution. Since then, the app has lived in a kind of legal limbo while Washington argues about divestment terms and potential buyers.
TikTok’s user numbers suggest that most people met that whole drama with a shrug. They kept the app. They kept watching.
The underlying draw has not changed. The recommendation engine is still brutally effective at guessing what each viewer will watch next. The basic format of full screen, short form video is still tuned to boredom and idle thumbs. Rival platforms can copy that format, and they have, but it turns out to be hard to recreate the specific mix of editing tools, creator culture, and ranking logic that gives TikTok its pull.
All of that raises an awkward point for policymakers. Years of hearings, warnings, and even a Supreme Court ruling have not yet persuaded U.S. adults to walk away from the product.
X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has dominated headlines since Elon Musk took it private in 2022. The new Pew numbers show a service that is smaller and more partisan, but not yet empty.
Roughly one in five U.S. adults say they use X at all. That share is lower than the reach of Reddit or Snapchat. Only one in ten adults say they visit X every day, compared with roughly a quarter for TikTok and about half for Facebook and YouTube.
The composition of that smaller audience has shifted. A few years ago, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say they used Twitter. In the 2025 results the pattern has flipped, with Republicans now more likely to report using X. What people see in their feeds reflects that shift.
Meanwhile, the list of successors is getting crowded without any one of them taking over. Survey data puts Meta’s Threads in the high single digits as a share of U.S. adults, with Bluesky and Truth Social each a few points behind that. Those audiences run into the millions. They are nowhere near Twitter’s old centrality in news and politics.
What seems to be happening instead is fragmentation. Journalists, politicians, and commentators are now spread across several sites, plus private WhatsApp and Signal chats. Some people who left X now post mainly on Threads. Others prefer Bluesky’s looser, more experimental communities. Quite a few simply spend that time on TikTok or Instagram instead.
For Meta, this is a comfortable middle ground. Threads does not need to become “the new Twitter” to serve its purpose. It mainly has to keep people inside Meta’s universe when they want a text-based stream rather than a video feed.
The most important platform in the Pew report might be the one that attracts the least public drama. YouTube looks less like a social app and more like part of the plumbing of the internet.
More than eight in ten U.S. adults say they use YouTube. That is higher than any other platform in the survey. Among adults under 30, it is above nine in ten. Among those 65 and older, it is still roughly seven in ten. Gender, education, and party affiliation make almost no difference to basic adoption.
Daily use is just as striking. Close to half of adults say they go on YouTube at least once a day, and roughly a third say they do so several times a day. Both numbers are within a few points of Facebook’s. Among younger adults, YouTube comfortably outperforms Facebook on daily use.
On top of everything else, YouTube quietly rivals Facebook as a news source. Separate polling finds that well over a third of U.S. adults say they regularly get news on Facebook, with YouTube only a few points behind. Because YouTube’s overall reach is higher, that news audience is enormous.
Yet public debate tends to pass over YouTube in favour of more obviously political platforms. Lawmakers haul Meta and TikTok into hearings. Parents fret about Instagram and teen mental health. Commentators argue about X and extremism. YouTube keeps shaping what hundreds of millions of people watch every day with relatively less scrutiny.
It is worth dwelling on that for a moment. When more than eighty percent of adults use a single video platform, its recommendation system becomes a quiet policy instrument. Decisions about what to promote, what to demote, and what to demonetise are not just technical tweaks. They decide which voices can build careers, which fringe ideas stay on the fringe, and which spread into the mainstream.
If concern about platform power is genuine, YouTube belongs at the centre of the conversation, not at its edge.
Q: How does Pew Research actually measure social media usage?
A: Pew asks whether respondents "visit or use" each platform and how often. It doesn't track session length, what people watch, or how they engage. A three-second notification check counts identically to a 40-minute video session. This makes platforms optimized for frequent check-ins appear more dominant than those optimized for longer sessions.
Q: How much time do people actually spend on TikTok compared to Facebook?
A: Third-party time-use data puts TikTok around 50 minutes per day for the average U.S. user. Facebook and Instagram sit closer to 30 minutes. TikTok reaches fewer adults overall (37% vs Facebook's 71%), but users who do open the app tend to stay significantly longer per session.
Q: Why does YouTube get less regulatory scrutiny than Facebook or TikTok?
A: YouTube launched in 2005, before social media's reputation crisis began. Its video format feels different from text-based social networks, even though engagement patterns are similar. Google's handling has involved fewer public controversies than Meta's. Yet YouTube's 84% adult reach means its recommendation algorithm shapes information consumption at massive scale.
Q: Did X actually lose users after Elon Musk took over?
A: X dropped from 22% adult reach in early 2024 to 21% in mid-2025, a modest decline. Daily users fell more noticeably, from 13% to 10% of adults. The platform also saw political composition shift, with Democrats now less likely than Republicans to use it, reversing the 2023 pattern. Gradual attrition, not collapse.
Q: What's the difference between a "checking" platform and a "watching" platform?
A: Checking platforms like Facebook optimize for frequent short visits driven by notifications, messages, and event reminders. Watching platforms like TikTok optimize for longer sessions of sustained video consumption. One person might check Facebook three times daily for 90 seconds each. Another watches TikTok once for 30 minutes. Both register as "daily users" in surveys.
Marcus Schuler
Marcus Schuler
Maria Garcia
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