Inequality and Teen Social Media Use

Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. 

Daniel A. Cox reports on the 2026 American Teenagers Survey from the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life:

American teenagers spend hours online each day, with apps such as YouTube and TikTok dominating their attention. Thirty-five percent spend at least four hours a day on social media or playing video games. The amount of time teens spend engaged in these activities varies across households. The survey finds that teen girls raised by parents without college degrees are on more social media apps, spend more hours using them, and are less inclined to cut back than girls whose parents went to college, while among boys, the same divide emerges in the hours spent gaming.

The class divide in social media use may exacerbate existing inequalities instead of reducing them. Among teen girls, more active social media engagement is associated with negative personal outcomes, including less sleep, lower rates of reading, and lower feelings of personal satisfaction.

The majority of teenagers are spending multiple hours on social media every day. About four in 10 (39 percent) spend three or more hours of their day online. YouTube and TikTok are the most popular social media platforms teens visit. More than seven in 10 (72 percent) spend time on YouTube every week, while six in 10 say the same of TikTok. Gaming also eats up a significant portion of teens’ free time, although less so than social media. More than four in 10 (44 percent) teens spend at least an hour gaming every day.

Teen girls raised in less educated households are more likely to use Instagram (66 percent vs. 57 percent), Snapchat (49 percent vs. 44 percent), Facebook (31 percent vs. 15 percent), and X (12 percent vs. 6 percent). The education gap is largest in TikTok use. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of teen girls raised by parents without college degrees spend time on the app, compared with only about half (53 percent) of teen girls whose parents have college degrees. There is also a significant difference in the number of apps they use.[v] Forty-one percent of teen girls with non-college-educated parents report using at least four different social media apps, compared with 25 percent of teen girls raised by college-educated parents.

This same gap is also evident in the amount of time teen girls spend on social media. About one in five (21 percent) say they spend between one and two hours on social media every day. Thirty-nine percent of teens report they spend less than an hour a day or do not use social media at all. Teen girls whose parents did not go to college, however, log more hours on social media than any of their peers. Nearly half (49 percent) of teen girls raised by parents without a college degree report spending three or more hours a day using social media, compared with 36 percent of teen girls with college-educated parents.

Parental education is also correlated with teens’ efforts to reduce their screen time. Among girls, those raised in households with parents of higher education levels are more likely to report attempting to reduce their time spent online. Nearly six in 10 (58 percent) teen girls raised by college-educated parents say they have tried to reduce their social media activity in the past 12 months. In contrast, only 40 percent of teen girls who have non-college-educated parents report attempts to lessen their social media activity.

There is no evidence of the same divide among teen boys; they report similar social media usage patterns regardless of parental education. More evident education divides show up in boys’ gaming habits. Teen boys raised by parents without college degrees spend substantially more time gaming. Nearly three in 10 (28 percent) teen boys raised by parents without college degrees say they spend an average of four or more hours a day playing video games. Among teen boys with college-educated parents, only 19 percent play video games this often. Among teen girls, it’s only 7 percent.

Israel Losing US Support

Many posts have discussed relations between the US and Israel

 Franklin Foer at The Atlantic:

Just over a decade ago, support for Israel was one of the last remaining bipartisan reflexes in American politics. The harshest thing most mainstream Democrats said about the country was that Netanyahu’s government was obstructing a two-state agreement with Palestinians. But in the years since the October 7 Hamas-led massacre of Israelis and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, that consensus, which was already losing ground among the Democratic rank and file, gave way. Two years ago, 19 senators in the Democratic caucus voted to block arms sales to Israel; this April, 40 out of 47 did—including most of the presidential aspirants within the caucus. Now, the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population in the world is an avowed anti-Zionist who campaigned on the promise that he would arrest Netanyahu; a Columbia University activist who joined an October 8, 2023, rally celebrating the Hamas attacks will almost certainly be elected to the next Congress. Leading liberal senators, including Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, have made criticism of Israel a central part of their message.

...

Bigots would have found a pretext to hate Israel, no matter what. Anti-Israel extremism was flourishing in the American university before October 7, which is why a succession of suspiciously well-organized protests against Israel erupted the day after the worst pogrom since the Holocaust. But Israel will come to regret how much American political support it has sacrificed on Netanyahu’s watch—and not just on the left. Political independents have come to sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis; 60 percent of American adults have an unfavorable view of Netanyahu’s country; a majority of Republicans under the age of 45 oppose renewing Obama’s military-aid package; support among young evangelicals, once the pro-Israel bastion of the electorate, is cratering. Netanyahu’s legacy is Israel’s isolation. Perhaps that wasn’t preventable. His failure is that he never tried to avoid this fate.

Pew:

Gallup:

 

Teens, Extracurriculars, and Inequality

Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. 

Inequalities feed on one another. Kids from noncollege families engage in fewer extracurriculars,which in turn hurts their chances at getting into good colleges and getting good jobs.

Daniel A. Cox reports on the 2026 American Teenagers Survey from the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life:

In addition to age, parental education levels shape how teens engage in extracurricular activities. Teens with college-educated parents tend to participate in a greater range of activities than those whose parents do not have a four-year college degree do. For instance, nearly one in four teens—including 29 percent of teen girls—with college-educated parents report participating in an academic club, compared with 13 percent of teens whose parents did not graduate from college. Teens with college-educated parents are also three times as likely to participate in student government or debate as those with less educated parents (12 percent vs. 4 percent).

With an expanding list of extracurriculars to participate in, teens live more scheduled lives now than ever before. Only 28 percent of teens say that they get at least eight hours of sleep every night. Forty-one percent say they get this much sleep a few times a week. Three in 10 teenagers report getting eight hours of sleep no more than once per week.

Make America Sick Again

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.The greatest spreader of vaccine misinformation is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Teddy Rosenbluth at NYT:

The United States has now recorded more cases of measles in 2026 than in any other year since the virus was declared eliminated in 2000, a grim sign that the country may be headed toward a new era in which the disease regularly sickens thousands every year.

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that there have been 2,318 confirmed cases of measles so far this year. The case count toppled the record set last year, when measles infected more than 2,200 Americans and killed two unvaccinated children. More measles cases have been reported in the United States in the last two years than in all the years from 2000 through 2024 combined.

Reversing course on measles would require a nationwide push to improve vaccination rates, a prospect that experts said seemed unlikely under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He has halted funding for vaccine hesitancy research, downplayed the risks of measles and spearheaded a hunt for evidence that vaccines are unsafe.

In November, a panel of international experts will meet to determine whether the United States has lost its elimination status, which has long been viewed as one of the country’s crowning public health achievements.

Hafiz Rashid at TNR:

Americans now have to deal with a salmonella outbreak affecting eggs, on top of everything else.

Midwest Poultry Services is recalling close to 1.6 million white shell eggs and brown cage-free shell eggs produced in Texas, the Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday. The eggs in question have the potential to be contaminated with Salmonella enteritidis, and were being sold at Kroger stores in Texas and Louisiana, as well as Brookshire Grocery stores in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, and New Mexico.

The company has stopped distributing eggs produced on its Texas farms, according to the FDA. Salmonella enteritidis is a bacterium that can survive on the shell of an egg or inside it, and could cause symptoms including cramps, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, chills, ⁠fever, and headaches.

The salmonella scare comes after an explosive diarrhea outbreak hit the country from tainted lettuce produced by Taylor Farms. That produce contained cyclospora, a one-celled parasite, and has affected at least 41 states with over 12,000 possible cases. On top of that, the New World screwworm, a flesh-eating parasite, has infested cattle in Texas and spread to other states, causing an estimated $1 billion in damages.

The Trump administration has cut a lot of the programs that prevented these types of outbreaks in the past, and now the country seems to be dealing with one food crisis after another. Elon Musk’s DOGE cut a monitoring program for the screwworm and gutted the team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responsible for responding to cyclospora outbreaks. Hopefully, the salmonella issue remains isolated, although the administration hasn’t inspired much confidence thus far.

RFK Jr said "We're going to give infectious disease a break for about 8 years"

Cyclospora, Ebola, Hantavirus, measles and salmonella outbreaks later, it's pretty obvious that infectious disease is not going to give *us* a break

And cutting funding for it was a foolish idea pic.twitter.com/mUcSmdK1WQ

— Neil Stone (@DrNeilStone) July 26, 2026

Israel Lobbying

Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy.  And many posts have discussed relations between the US and Israel

Jacob Wendler at POLITICO:

Israel is shifting away from its traditional strategy of relying on American-led groups like AIPAC to advance its interests in the U.S., and is instead increasingly hiring foreign agents to ramp up its influence efforts, per a new paper from foreign policy think tank the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

— Israel has spent over $1 billion on public diplomacy efforts since 2023 — including more than $100 million on efforts to influence the U.S. disclosed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, per the new report from Nick Cleveland-Stout, a research associate in the Quincy Institute’s Democratizing Foreign Policy program. The country is now on track to be the biggest FARA spender this year.

— Seventeen new firms registered under FARA to work for Israeli interests in 2024 and 2025, including former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale’s firm Clock Tower X, which holds the largest contract at $46.5 million, per the report. Clock Tower X has disclosed attempts to seed pro-Israel framing into LLM training data via a network of websites designed to influence AI chatbots like ChatGPT.

— Israel has also spent millions to court social media influencers and fund mass texting campaigns aimed at swaying public opinion, per FARA filings reviewed by the Quincy Institute. The country paid $161,000 to influencer Yoav Davis, who oversees the Instagram account @jews_of_ny with nearly 200,000 followers. It also paid firm Bridges Partners $900,000 to pay more than a dozen influencers — none of whom have registered as foreign agents.

— Israel’s U.S. influence efforts are largely funneled through French company Havas Media, which has subcontracted seven different firms under FARA since 2024, including Democratic PR shop SKDK and Bridges Partners. Many of the subcontractors specialize in reaching critical groups whose support for the country is waning, including young Americans, Evangelicals and conservatives. In September 2025, Havas inked a $3.2 million contract with Christian marketing firm Show Faith by Works to undertake a controversial “geofencing” campaign aimed at targeting American churchgoers with pro-Israel ads.

— Israel and its backers in the U.S. have escalated their efforts to repair the country’s reputation in the U.S. amid intensifying criticism from members of Congress and Vice President JD Vance. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also expected to visit Washington next week to meet with President Donald Trump, Netanyahu’s office announced today.

— “Israel’s new tactics are transforming America’s influence landscape, but they have so far proved insufficient to counter the erosion in public support that is being driven by Israel’s deeply unpopular policies,” Cleveland-Stout writes in the paper.

No Tribute, No Pardon

 Many posts have addressed the president's pardon power.

A pardon industry has arisen during the Trump years.

But not all can afford to pay.

 Kenneth P. Vogel and Alan Feuer at NYT:

President Trump quietly denied nearly 6,000 clemency applications this month from people who mostly lacked political connections and had waited patiently in a queue while he awarded pardons and commutations to allies who had skipped the line.

The denials came after his administration had raised hopes that he might mark the country’s semiquincentennial by granting clemency to as many as 250 people.

That raft of clemency grants did not materialize. Instead, Mr. Trump doled out fewer than 20 pardons on July 3 to Clean Air Act scofflaws along with a political donor.

Thousands of other petitioners were left waiting.

The denials were announced inside the Justice Department in a July 14 letter from Ed Martin, the U.S. pardon attorney, to United States attorneys across the country.

Politics as a Safety Risk

Many posts have discussed  partisan polarization and political violence.

Benedict Vigers at Pew:

Although Americans are most likely to name road accidents and crime as the two biggest threats to their personal safety, no other population in the world is more likely to identify politics as a safety concern.

According to a 2026 Lloyd's Register Foundation World Risk Poll report, one in 10 U.S. adults identify politics as the greatest source of risk to their personal safety when asked an open-ended question. This is up from 6% in both 2021 and 2023 and 10 times the global average of 1% across 140 countries.

The U.S. statistically ties with Hungary (at 9%, measured several months before the recent election) for the highest percentage of adults identifying politics as their top safety concern. Other countries with relatively high percentages of mentions include Serbia, Latvia and Lithuania (at 6% each) and Slovakia, Russia, Myanmar, Spain and Israel (all at 5%).

...

Polarization unites these responses, whether people express it directly or indirectly. Many Democrats cite the current administration, while many Republicans point to the Democratic Party — both indirect demonstrations of polarization. However, others from across the political spectrum name polarization and the wider political climate directly when thinking about risks to their safety:

“I would have to say the state of polarization of the American people.” (Republican, 54, Male)

“I would say political extremism. I don't have a lot of personal risk, but I do feel the biggest risk is people that are fanatical about their position and that they could be violent.” (Independent, 42, Male)

“The political situation has a lot to do with the fact whether if I am safe or not. I am concerned where we're going or might go.” (Democrat, 69, Female)