As Congress considers TikTok‘s effects on the mental health of teens, the Pew Research Center is gathering more data about the app’s adult users. The center’s new report, titled “How U.S. Adults Use TikTok,” uncovers some trends related to the titular platform’s viewers — many of whom never post videos of their own.
Pew’s survey asked U.S. adults to answer questions on topics like videomaking, profile editing, and the For You Page. The results are broken down by age demographics, but across all generations, about half of U.S. TikTok users show no interest in creating their own content. 52% of respondents said that they have posted at least one video on their personal TikTok accounts. The 35-to-49-year-old cohort scored the highest on that axis; 60% of that group has posted at least one TikTok.
No matter how you split the data, U.S. TikTok users fall into two fairly even categories: The posters and the non-posters. The former group is 38% more likely to update the biographical information on their profile and 9% more likely to use a nickname rather than their default handle. The posters also have more followers on average (obviously) and they are slightly more likely to be very satisfied by the content on their For You Page.
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Even among the people who post videos on TikTok, there are smaller subgroups that produce much more content on the ByteDance-owned app. Pew’s data shows that the top 25% most active TikTok users have uploaded 98% of the platform’s videos, with the bottom three quarters contributing the final 2%.
But in the end, Pew’s survey is more interesting because of the commonalities it shows, not the differences. The results showed no significant generational divides between the usage habits of TikTok-obsessed Gen Z and their elders. U.S. adults are even starting to agree with teens when it comes to the possibility of a TikTok ban. A previous raft of Pew data published last December found that the number of Americans who would support a proposed ban is declining.
