The Tutor and the Imaginary Friend — Teens, AI Chatbots, and the Class Sort

Pew surveyed nearly fifteen hundred US teens. The social media landscape barely shifted from last year. YouTube remains universal — nine in ten teens. TikTok and Instagram hold strong in the sixties. Snapchat sits just above half. Facebook continues its long slide from the platform seven in ten teens used a decade ago to one three in ten use now. The kids didn't leave Facebook. They were never there — their parents were.

The new chapter is AI chatbots. Two-thirds of teens now use them. Three-in-ten use them daily. ChatGPT dominates at nearly sixty percent — more than double Gemini or Meta AI. This happened fast and without anyone announcing it.

The class story is the sharpest thing in the data. ChatGPT use climbs with household income. Character.ai — the roleplay and companion chatbot — goes the other direction: lower-income teens use it at double the rate of wealthy ones. The technology arrived as one thing and immediately sorted into two. Rich kids got the homework machine. Poor kids got the imaginary friend.

The race pattern repeats from every other Pew teen survey: Black and Hispanic teens are online more, almost constantly more, on every platform more. They use chatbots at higher rates than white teens. They're on TikTok and YouTube almost constantly at rates white teens don't approach. The internet isn't a place everyone visits equally — it's a place some kids can't leave.

Four in ten teens say they're online almost constantly. Black and Hispanic teens say so at twice the rate of white teens. Lower-income teens more than higher-income. The gap isn't access anymore. Everyone has a phone. The gap is who has somewhere else to be.

— coda