YouTube is the most popular social media platform

Social media has become inexorably intertwined with our daily lives, but not all platforms are equally popular. For every cultural phenomenon like TikTok, there’s a Mastodon.

It would be easy, based on the news media’s borderline obsession with TikTok and X, to assume that those platforms are, if not the most used social media tools in America today, then very close to the top. They’re not. In fact, they’re squarely in the middle, according to a new study from Pew Research.

Instead, it’s YouTube that is the most commonly used social media platform in the U.S.—by a landslide. Pew reports that 84% of U.S. adults use YouTube. (The platform is also the most widely used by U.S. teens.) Facebook ranks high in usage as well, with 71% of adults saying they use it. Roughly half of U.S. adults say they visit each of these platforms at least once a day.

Another Meta holding, Instagram, comes in third with 50% of the 5,022 adults surveyed saying they use it. Things fall off from there, though. YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram are the only platforms with usage figures above 50%.

TikTok, which ranks fourth, is used by just 37% of the adult respondents (usage numbers by teens and tweens are almost certainly much higher). WhatsApp comes in at 32% and Reddit at 26%, which is just a fraction above Snapchat’s 25%.

While X comes in with roughly 20% of respondents saying they use it, Meta’s Threads is used by just 8% of the people Pew surveyed, Bluesky by 4%, and Truth Social is last among the ranked sites, coming in at just 3%.

Pew’s study looked beyond which sites are the most popular to also give a demographic breakdown of who’s using what. As you might expect, adults younger than 30 are more frequent users of social media than older adults, but that also can vary by platform. (For instance, while YouTube sees heavy usage from all age groups, Instagram is used by 80% of adults between 18 and 29, but only 19% of people 65 or older.)

Here’s how usage breaks down by other demographic fields.

Gender

Women are much more likely to use platforms that lean toward communication and interaction. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are most used by that demographic, while men opt more for X and Reddit.

Ethnicity

While people of all races and ethnicities use social media, some groups favor certain platforms more than others. Pew reports that TikTok and WhatsApp are used more frequently by Black and Hispanic adults. Among the survey pool, Instagram is used regularly by 62% of Hispanics, 58% of Asians, and 54% of Black adults versus 45% of white adults.

Education

Americans with higher levels of education are more likely to use Reddit, WhatsApp, and Instagram, the study found. People with less education lean toward TikTok. Roughly 40% of American adults with a college degree say they use Reddit, compared to just 15% of people with a high school diploma or less.

Political leanings

You can probably figure this one out without the study. Democrats and left-leaning folks are more likely than Republicans to use WhatsApp, Reddit, TikTok, Bluesky, and Threads. When it comes to X and Truth Social, things are reversed. Just two years ago, though, things weren’t as cut-and-dried. In 2023, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to use X (which was still Twitter until July 23 of that year).