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If it seems like young people are always online, it’s because they are — well, at least that’s the case for about half of them.
Some 45 percent of American teens say they are online “almost constantly,” according to a new survey from Pew Research. That number has nearly doubled from the 24 percent who said they were always online in Pew’s 2014-2015 study.
The results varied by gender. Fifty percent of girls said they were always online compared with 39 percent of boys.
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Teens’ internet presence has been enabled by near-universal adoption of smartphones, with 95 percent having access to a smartphone, according to the survey.
What are they doing with all that time online? Mostly using Snapchat and YouTube. Thirty-five percent of teens said they use Snapchat most often out of any internet platform, while 32 percent used YouTube most often. At 15 percent, Instagram was the third-most popular online platform among teens. Snapchat has remained popular with younger people, even as more users overall have flocked to Instagram.
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The jury is out on whether all that time online is good for them. About 30 percent of teens said that social media has had a mostly positive impact on people their age while 24 percent said the effect has been mostly negative. The biggest group — 45 percent of teens surveyed — said it has had neither a positive nor a negative effect.
For this survey, Pew interviewed 1,058 parents who have a teen aged 13 to 17, as well as 743 teens online and by telephone from March 7 to April 10, 2018.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.