A living fact sheet is only as current as its last fielding

The test

Pew Research Center maintains a Social Media Fact Sheet that tracks the share of US adults who say they use each major platform, updated as new survey waves complete rather than published once on a fixed date. As retrieved on 16 September 2026, the page's most recent fielding is a survey of 5,022 US adults conducted 5 February to 18 June 2025, carried out by SSRS using the National Public Opinion Reference Survey, an address-based sample with a web, mail and phone protocol designed to give nearly all US adults a chance of selection.

What the evidence says

A companion report, Americans' Social Media Use 2025, published 20 November 2025, states the topline figures from that fielding: 84 percent of US adults say they ever use YouTube, 71 percent Facebook, 50 percent Instagram, 37 percent TikTok, 32 percent WhatsApp and 26 percent Reddit. The report also states that TikTok use has risen from 21 percent in 2021 to 37 percent in 2025, and Instagram from 40 percent to 50 percent over the same period, growth Pew attributes to its own repeated survey series rather than to any platform's internal metrics. The fact sheet's demographic tables add that 95 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds report using YouTube against 64 percent of adults 65 and older, and that TikTok use ranges from 63 percent among 18-to-29-year-olds to 12 percent among those 65 and older.

The sample and the variance

Every figure on the fact sheet describes self-reported platform use among a probability-based sample of US adults in a specific fielding window; it does not describe active users, minutes spent, or non-US populations, and Pew's own note states that survey mode changed in 2023, complicating strict comparisons with pre-2023 waves. Because the page updates with each new wave, a figure copied from it today may already be superseded by the time this trace is read, which is why the fact sheet itself, rather than any single percentage, should be the object of citation.

What to try next

Anyone citing a Pew social media percentage should record the exact fielding window shown on the page at the time of retrieval, since the fact sheet is a living document rather than a fixed report. This is a documentation habit worth adopting, not a claim about any platform's growth trajectory.

• What fielding window does the fact sheet show today, and does it match the window cited in the source being checked?
• Is the cited figure use among all US adults, or a specific age, gender or platform-use subgroup?
• Has Pew's survey mode or question wording changed since the wave being cited, affecting comparability?

A living fact sheet is a strong source precisely because it is dated to a stated fielding window rather than frozen at a moment; treating it as always-current, instead of checking that window, is the error most likely to mislead a reader.