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Christopher Ross

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Teen Facebook use is on par with 2022, and Meta's audience is still growing

By 4 min read

I assumed Facebook had been bleeding users for a decade. Pew's survey puts teen use far below 2014 but level with 2022, and Meta's own audience figure is still rising. What that does and does not tell us about layoffs.

Key takeaways

  • Pew Research found 31 percent of U.S. teens use Facebook in 2025, against 71 percent in 2014 to 2015, and it describes the 2025 figure as "on par with 2022." Pew's report gives no data points in between.
  • Meta reported 3.60 billion daily active people across its family of apps for June 2026, up 3 percent year over year. The figure covers the whole family, so it cannot be split out for Facebook alone.
  • Users leaving cannot explain cuts at a company whose audience and revenue are both growing, which makes the "legacy brands are bleeding" explanation for 2026 layoffs hard to defend.

In the LinkedIn opinion this series grew out of, I wrote that Facebook had been bleeding users for a decade. It is the sort of sentence that sounds right because everyone has said it at a dinner table. I checked it, and the evidence does not back it up as I wrote it. The main piece in this series has the wider argument. This one stays with the audience numbers.

What Pew measured

Pew Research Center surveyed 1,458 U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 between 25 September and 9 October 2025, through Ipsos. In its December 2025 report, 31 percent said they use Facebook. The report says that is "far lower than the 71% in 2014-15, though on par with 2022."

Teen use is far below where it was a decade ago. The report does not say when in between the fall happened, and "on par with 2022" tells us only that the two most recent readings match. It does not tell us the line has been flat for three years, though it is consistent with that.

Other platforms moved. WhatsApp, owned by Meta, rose from 17 percent in 2022 to 24 percent. X fell from 33 percent in 2014 to 2015 to 23 percent in 2022 and 16 percent now. Snapchat sits at 55 percent. The report puts YouTube at roughly nine in ten, and TikTok and Instagram at about six in ten or more. This is a teen survey of whether a teenager says they use a platform at all. It does not measure time spent, and it says nothing about adults.

What Meta reports

Meta counts "daily active people," or DAP, across all of its apps. Its second-quarter 2026 results filing says "DAP was 3.60 billion on average for June 2026, an increase of 3% year-over-year." Revenue for the quarter was $60.80 billion, up 28 percent. The exhibit does not report a Facebook-only audience, so I cannot tell you what Facebook alone did, and anyone quoting a precise Facebook trend from this filing is reading more into it than it contains.

Instagram and WhatsApp belong to the same company, which changes what a teenager's move means. A teenager who drifts from Facebook to Instagram has left one product and is still inside the business. The Pew data and the Meta data measure different things, and both can be true at once.

Why this matters for the layoff question

One popular explanation for recent tech cuts is that the older platforms are in decline and are shedding staff as their audiences age out. Parts of that may be true over a twenty-year horizon. As an explanation for 2026 it has a problem: the largest of those companies reported a growing audience and growing revenue in the same quarter it booked severance for a headcount reduction. The audience-decline story does not fit that quarter.

A company can lose the next generation of one product and still spend as if a different future were arriving on a particular schedule. The spending side of that is in AI is in the budget more than in the headcount, and the older explanation the executives gave in their own words is in the piece on pandemic hiring and interest rates.

A fair version of "legacy brands are vulnerable" is therefore about cohorts and bets, and Meta's audience is still growing. Teenagers are choosing other places, and the company that owns Facebook owns several of those places too.

What I would say now

I would not repeat the "bleeding users" line. I would say that teen use of Facebook is far below its 2014 level and level with 2022, that Meta's own audience measure is rising, and that the big platforms' 2026 problems look more like allocation problems than audience problems. That is a less dramatic sentence, and it is one I can point to sources for.

How this was made. AI tools did the source reading and checking for this piece, and AI reviewers argued against the draft before it went out. The question is mine, and so is the decision to publish it.

Common questions

What percentage of teens use Facebook? Pew Research Center found 31 percent of U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 use Facebook in its late-2025 survey, against 71 percent in 2014 to 2015. Pew describes the 2025 figure as on par with 2022.

Is Meta's audience shrinking? Not according to its own reporting. Meta reported 3.60 billion daily active people across its family of apps in June 2026, up 3 percent from a year earlier. The figure covers all of its apps together, not Facebook alone.

References

Checked against the sources above, as listed, on 2026-10-29.