Where Teens Spend Their Time Online

By Rebecca Paredes

October 22, 2025

Teen looking at social media apps on phone

Welcome to Parent Pixels, a parenting newsletter filled with practical advice, news, and resources to support you and your kids in the digital age. This week:

88% of parents have rules around screen time, 87% of teens use iPhones, and more of the latest stats on tweens, teens, and tech.
Meta announces new parental controls for its AI chats, and Pinterest gives users a way to turn AI recommendations off.
Why is AI slop overwhelming your child’s social media feed — and should they use Sora?

Digital parenting

📊 How tweens and teens use tech, by the numbers: Did you know that 42% of parents say could they do a better job managing their child’s screen time? That’s according to a new report by Pew Research Center. Here’s what the data showed:

92% of parents say ease of contact is the key reason they let their child have a phone.
88% of parents say they don’t let their child use a smartphone because their child might see inappropriate things online.
57% of parents of an 11 or 12-year-old say their child has their own smartphone, compared with 29% of parents of an 8- to 10-year-old.
86% of parents have rules around when, where or how their child can use screens, but just 55% say they stick to their screen time rules most of the time.

We also have new numbers about where kids spend their time online and what risks they face:

TikTok (46%) is the most used social media app for teens, followed by Instagram (31%) and Snapchat (14%).
Half of girls exposed to harmful content online with teens are twice as likely to see it on TikTok and X.
94% of boys are online daily, and nearly three-quarters of boys 11 to 17 are regularly exposed to content about what it means to “be a man.”

One thing that didn’t change from last year: 87% of teens own an iPhone. If you want a parental monitoring app that actually works on Apple devices, you need BrightCanary.

🤖 Meta and Pinterest roll out updates to AI: Meta announced parental controls for its AI chat experiences, including the ability to turn off chats with AI characters for teens. Parents can also disable individual AI characters, review topics their teen discusses with Meta AI, and know that AI experiences are now PG-13 — which means they’ll allegedly avoid content with nudity, graphic content, or drug use. While these updates sound promising, you should stay involved with your child’s social media use, especially if they’re talking to AI companions.

Meanwhile, Pinterest rolled out a way for users to filter AI images out of their recommendations. It’s relatively common for generative AI images to end up in categories like fashion, beauty, and home decor, but this new setting maintains the human touch in what ends up on your child’s Pinterest feed. If they use Pinterest, we recommend walking them through how to find this feature in Settings > Refine Your Recommendations.

Want to learn how to protect your child from risky AI apps right now? Download our free AI Safety Toolkit for Parents. It includes step-by-step guidance for monitoring AI use and talking to your teen about AI.

🎥 AI slop takes over social media after OpenAI’s Sora launch: OpenAI’s new app, Sora, lets users create and remix short AI-generated videos … and upload their own faces so they can include them in skits. Experts warn this could make deepfakes harder to detect and open the door to harassment and misinformation (as well as copyright infringement). We’re working on a Sora guide for parents on the BrightCanary blog. What questions do you have about it?

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Tech talks

It’s never been harder to tell what’s real online. Between AI videos, virtual friends, and algorithm-fed content, helping your teen think critically is key. Here are a few ways to start the conversation:

“How can you tell if something you see online is real or AI-generated?”
“Have you ever seen a video that looked real but wasn’t? How did you figure it out?”
“Do you think AI should have rules about what it can say to kids?”
“What’s a good way to double-check information before believing it?”
“Do you think it’s okay for people to make videos of others without their consent?”

What's catching our eye

⚠️ That didn’t take long — experts warn that ChatGPT’s new parental controls are easy to bypass. A Washington Post columnist did it in minutes.

🐻 California Governor Newsom signed two key bills into law. SB 243 requires AI companion apps to prevent conversation about suicide, self-harm, and sexual contact with minors; clearly disclose when users are chatting with AI; and allow citizens to sue AI companies. AB 36 requires warning labels on social media platforms.

💡 Did you know? You can use BrightCanary to monitor your child’s Roblox chats on their iPhone and iPad. Here’s why we recommend monitoring Roblox.