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YouTube is once again the most popular social media platform

But Facebook's users are as addicted as ever.

Anatoliy Sizov via Getty Images

YouTube and Facebook are still the most dominant social media platforms in the United States, but Facebook is no longer growing. That’s one of the major findings of a new report on how Americans use social media from the Pew Research Center.

According to the report, YouTube and Facebook are the most widely used platforms. But of the two, only YouTube is still growing, increasing its share of users from 73 percent of adults in 2019, to 81 percent in 2021. Facebook’s numbers, meanwhile, remained unchanged from 2019 at 69 percent. “Facebook’s growth has leveled off over the last five years, but it remains one of the most widely used social media sites among adults in the United States,” Pew writes in its report.

Flat growth wasn’t unique to just Facebook, either. According to Pew, the only other platform to see “statistically significant” growth since 2019 was Reddit, which grew from 11 percent in 2019 to 18 percent in 2021. “This represents a broader trend that extends beyond the past two years in which the rapid adoption of most of these sites and apps seen in the last decade has slowed,” Pew says.

YouTube is once again the most dominant platform, according to a new report from Pew research.
Pew

But while growth has slowed down, Americans don’t seem to be any less addicted to social media. Among Facebook users, 49 percent say they check the site multiple times a day. Likewise, 45 percent of Snapchat users open the app more than once a day, as do 38 percent of Instagram users. For YouTube, just over a third of users report visiting the service more frequently than once a day.

The report also lends some interesting insight into TikTok’s user base, which wasn’t included in the 2019 research. According to the report, 21 percent of Americans say they use TikTok. But the numbers look much different for younger people, with TikTok’s share rising to 48 percent among 18 to 29-year-olds. Unsurprisingly, YouTube is also the most dominant platform among this demographic at 95 percent, followed by Instagram with 71 percent, Facebook at 70 percent and Snapchat with 65 percent.