headline economic figures have become less and less of a useful guide to how actual families are doing—something repeatedly noted by Democrats during the Obama recovery and the Trump years. Inequality may be declining, but it still skews GDP and income figures, with most gains going to the few, not the many. The obscene cost of health care saps family incomes and government coffers without making anyone feel healthier or wealthier.

To be clear, the headline economic numbers are strong. The gains are real. The reduction in inequality is tremendous, the pickup in wage growth astonishing, particularly if you anchor your expectations to the Barack Obama years, as many Biden staffers do.

During the Biden-Harris years, more granular data pointed to considerable strain. Real median household income fell relative to its pre-COVID peak. The poverty rate ticked up, as did the jobless rate. The number of Americans spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent climbed. The delinquency rate on credit cards surged, as did the share of families struggling to afford enough nutritious food, as did the rate of homelessness.

the White House never passed the permanent care-economy measures it had considered.

the biggest problem, one that voters talked about at any given opportunity, was the unaffordability of American life. The giant run-up in inflation during the Biden administration made everything feel expensive, and the sudden jump in the cost of small-ticket, common purchases (such as fast food and groceries) highlighted how bad the country’s long-standing large-ticket, sticky costs (health care, child care, and housing) had gotten. The cost-of-living crisis became the defining issue of the campaign, and one where the incumbent Democrats’ messaging felt false and weak.

Rather than acknowledging the pain and the trade-offs and the complexity—and rather than running a candidate who could have criticized Biden’s economic plans—Democrats dissembled. They noted that inflation was a global phenomenon, as if that mattered to moms in Ohio and machinists in the Central Valley. They pushed the headline numbers. They insisted that working-class voters were better off, and ran on the threat Trump posed to democracy and rights. But were working-class voters really better off? Why wasn’t anyone listening when they said they weren’t?

Voters do seem to be less likely to vote in their economic self-interest these days, and more likely to vote for a culturally compelling candidate. As my colleague Rogé Karma notes, lower-income white voters are flipping from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party on the basis of identitarian issues. The sharp movement of union voters to Trump seems to confirm the trend. At the same time, high-income voters are becoming bluer in order to vote their cosmopolitan values.

The Biden-Harris administration did make a difference in concrete, specific ways: It failed to address the cost-of-living catastrophe and had little to show for its infrastructure laws, even if it found a lot to talk about. And it dismissed voters who said they hated the pain they felt every time they had to open their wallet.

"The fog of war" is an expression that describes uncertainty about your adversary's capabilities and intentions while in the middle of battle. But it's also an appropriate way to describe our knowledge and understanding of history while living through it.

Everyone in the media seems to want this election to be about the issue they care most about, or to find a way to answer “why Trump won” or “what happened to the Democratic party” in a few sentences. I think that kind of quick summation is impossible. Elections are always decided by a confluence of several factors, some more important than others, and today I’m trying to lay out those factors I suspect were most relevant. That’s the goal: not to give a single, definitive answer, but a holistic and overarching one.

A lot of people, including Democratic strategists, have tried to explain to voters why they shouldn’t feel this way. They've pointed to low unemployment, inflation dissipating, and GDP growth — traditional metrics for measuring economic success — as proof that Bidenomics was working. But these macro numbers didn’t soothe the reality of what was happening at the granular level. Very few Democrats, and very few pundits, seem to have grasped this.

it turned out that Trump's 2020 performance (even in a loss) was the beginning of a new trend, not a fluke. While Democrats were focused on winning back white working-class voters, they actually lost support among their traditionally more multiethnic base.

Earlier this month, the Gender Equity Policy Institute released a new analysis of the 2022 Time Use Survey, administered by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Time Use Survey is not perfect or granular, but it’s widely understood as the best and broadest data set of how Americans allocate their time. The survey asks respondents where and how they worked, how much time they allocated to childcare and/or domestic tasks, and how many hours were dedicated to “leisure.” You can take a closer look at the survey methodology and results here — and while they do breakdown results by race, age, income, education level, marital status, occupation, and number of children in the household, they do not distinguish between heterosexual and queer relationships (and also divide gender as male or female)….which means this analysis does not account for how queer relationships, in so many meanings of the word, fit into this larger analysis. With that said — the findings are stunning.

women spend more than twice as much time allocated to household work than men, even when they are single or do not have children. And getting married doesn’t split the load for women, as it theoretically would, but increases it: married women without children still do 2.3 times as much housework labor as their husbands.

men just had to hunt, but women back at the cave had to tend fires and care for kids and tan animal hides blah blah blah etc etc etc. These narratives make the nonsensical make sense: how else would you explain dramatically different approaches to cleanliness that seem to be fairly neatly divided by gender? It has to be biological, otherwise, well, women have just been caring about things that ultimately matter very little for centuries.

this particular argument falls apart when you consider women who aren’t “naturally” good at cleaning, or multi-tasking, or even caregiving — or just don’t like it. (Hello, all the ADHDers in my DMs also responding to these stats). Within this framework, the only way to conceive of these women is as faulty specimens: people who would be weeded out by natural selection. And yet somehow these people are still here, being women!

“Everything we call a sex difference, if you take a different perspective — what’s the power angle on this — often explains things,” neuroscientist Lise Eliot tells Darcy Lockman in All the Rage. “It has served men very well to assume that male-female differences are hard-wired.”

cleaning can be pleasurable the same way that popping a zit is pleasurable. It’s gross but oddly cathartic to erase abjection and mess, or to create order out of chaos. But you cannot separate the pleasures of degreasing the stove top from the pleasures of successfully meeting the demands of proper performance of womanhood. It’s like people who say they “just like being thin.” So much of why you like it is because it grants you societal power.

men can clean! I know men who are good at it, who take pleasure in it, who are also excellent noticers and multitaskers — and almost all of them were either 1) raised by single mothers or 2) spent time in the military. They were socialized, over an extended period, to understand cleanliness and multi-tasking as essential — with personal and social consequences if they did not.

“When people come over and our house is a mess, I feel this reflects badly on me as a person, adult, wife, and mother. My husband doesn't feel that at all,” a reader named Leah told me. “My father-in-law once told my husband he wished our house was cleaner when he comes to visit (don’t get me started). So now I scour the place top to bottom. My husband just shrugs and says: whatever, my dad can deal with it. The same applies to our kid. My husband can send him to school in ripped, dirty, or too-small clothes and not worry what people will think of him and his parenting skills. Me? I’m worried they are about to call CPS on us.”

if you’re “safe” being bad at womanhood — you can blow off societal repercussions. But a messy or dirty domestic space intersects with so many other stereotypes of class, race, education level, body size, and marital status. “My grandma grew up extremely poor in the South and I’ve always felt there was a strong class element to her standard of cleanliness,” a woman named Aimee told me. “Like even if you had no money, get a broom and a rag because you at least need a clean house.”

Or: a single woman can have a dirty apartment if she’s a hot, dirty mess; take away the hot thinness and she’s just a slovenly cat lady spinster.

I don’t think most people believe this! Yet these understandings endure, asking women to feel like failures or oddities, setting up shop in our relationships and slowly festering.

It is tremendously hard to divest from a way of understanding your own value in the world — and, by extension, others.

Men are socialized to see their spaces as utilitarian, spaces that serve them. Women, we serve our spaces.”

We can attempt, as a society, to socialize boys and men to be more clean, to notice more, to multitask more, to spend more time on domestic tasks and to allocate less time to leisure. We can teach men that their value (and their morality) is also rooted in their capacity to maintain a clean home: that they should also serve their spaces.

some of this work has happened: men in their 30s and 40s today do more domestic labor than their grandparents or great-grandparents did. But the gender discrepancy in domestic labor closed and closed and then….got stuck at a 65/35 split, and hasn’t budged in years.

The math just doesn’t math when it comes to domestic labor. When dads start allocating more time to parenting, it doesn’t subtract from the time moms spent parenting. When women leave the home to work for pay, the number of hours they allocate to domestic tasks doesn’t decrease, as one might assume, but goes up. If men do more, women still…..do more.

If you feel bound by these expectations: what would it take to free you? Because when I survey the hundreds of responses that arrived in my DMS when I posted the stats above, what I felt most was fatigue. Just look in the fucking drawer, is that where the bras go??? one woman wrote. God I’m so tired.

I’m always suspicious of arguments that ask anyone who’s subjugated, in some way, to do more. But in this case, the work is difficult, particularly for bourgeois women, because the work feels like something we’re so rarely asked to do: less.

At my grandmother's funeral, literally every single speaker talked about how much she loved her...house. How much care she put into it, how it was the joy of her life and source of her identity. When I was a kid, there was "clean" and there was "grandma clean". And after my mother died and I was rocked by grief, my grandmother attempted to console me by suggesting it wasn't that big of a loss because my mom (her daughter-in-law) wasn't a good housekeeper. (My mom was working full time, had four kids at home, and was literally dying.) I was so angry with my grandmother I barely every spoke to her again, and then at her funeral listening to everyone talk about her love of her house (!!) drove home what a waste of a life that was. She could have been kind. She could have been kind to my mom, who'd lost her own mother and was struggling. She could have been kind to me, her grand-daughter who was grieving. She could have had a life that meant something, but instead she focused on her house, which she saw as an extension of herself, and serviced her own pride and vanity. What a WASTE.

I feel like I am constantly drowning in a sea of paperwork/phone calls/emails - fighting with our health and dental insurance, calling contractors/plumbers/etc to do things for our house, filling out new tax paperwork. Not to mention fielding the barrage of spam emails/calls. I feel like this kind of stuff has expanded exponentially and I can’t tell if it’s just me, but it feels like every single one of these is a fight - someone sent the wrong paperwork to us, so I have to fill it out again; the insurance company makes a mistake on the claim and I have to file an appeal and follow up on it; contractor says they’re going to do something, doesn’t do it completely, and I have to fight to get them to come finish the job they agreed to. I get that we are all stretched so thin & distracted, but I am exhausted by trying to keep up with the apparently “essential” stuff of modern American adulthood

now the streaming gold rush—the era that made Dickinson—is over. In the spring of 2022, the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates after years of nearly free credit, and at roughly the same time, Wall Street began calling in the streamers’ bets. The stock prices of nearly all the major companies with streaming platforms took precipitous falls, and none have rebounded to their prior valuation.

Thanks to decades of deregulation and a gush of speculative cash that first hit the industry in the late Aughts, while prestige TV was climbing the rungs of the culture, massive entertainment and media corporations had been swallowing what few smaller companies remained, and financial firms had been infiltrating the business, moving to reduce risk and maximize efficiency at all costs, exhausting writers in evermore unstable conditions.

The new effective bosses of the industry—colossal conglomerates, asset-management companies, and private-equity firms—had not been simply pushing workers too hard and grabbing more than their fair share of the profits. They had been stripping value from the production system like copper pipes from a house—threatening the sustainability of the studios themselves. Today’s business side does not have a necessary vested interest in “the business”—in the health of what we think of as Hollywood, a place and system in which creativity is exchanged for capital. The union wins did not begin to address this fundamental problem.

To the new bosses, the quantity of money that studios had been spending on developing screenplays—many of which would never be made—was obvious fat to be cut, and in the late Aughts, executives increasingly began offering one-step deals, guaranteeing only one round of pay for one round of work. Writers, hoping to make it past Go, began doing much more labor—multiple steps of development—for what was ostensibly one step of the process. In separate interviews, Dana Stevens, writer of The Woman King, and Robin Swicord described the change using exactly the same words: “Free work was encoded.” So was safe material. In an effort to anticipate what a studio would green-light, writers incorporated feedback from producers and junior executives, constructing what became known as producer’s drafts. As Rodman explained it: “Your producer says to you, ‘I love your script. It’s a great first draft. But I know what the studio wants. This isn’t it. So I need you to just make this protagonist more likable, and blah, blah, blah.’ And you do it.”

By 2019, the major Hollywood agencies had been consolidated into an oligopoly of four companies that controlled more than 75 percent of WGA writers’ earnings. And in the 2010s, high finance reached the agencies: by 2014, private equity had acquired Creative Artists Agency and William Morris Endeavor, and the latter had purchased IMG. Meeting benchmarks legible to the new bosses—deals actually made, projects off the ground—pushed agents to function more like producers, and writers began hearing that their asking prices were too high.

Executives, meanwhile, increasingly believed that they’d found their best bet in “IP”: preexisting intellectual property—familiar stories, characters, and products—that could be milled for scripts. As an associate producer of a successful Aughts IP-driven franchise told me, IP is “sort of a hedge.” There’s some knowledge of the consumer’s interest, he said. “There’s a sort of dry run for the story.” Screenwriter Zack Stentz, who co-wrote the 2011 movies Thor and X-Men: First Class, told me, “It’s a way to take risk out of the equation as much as possible.”

Multiple writers I spoke with said that selecting preexisting characters and cinematic worlds gave executives a type of psychic edge, allowing them to claim a degree of creative credit. And as IP took over, the perceived authority of writers diminished. Julie Bush, a writer-producer for the Apple TV+ limited series Manhunt, told me, “Executives get to feel like the author of the work, even though they have a screenwriter, like me, basically create a story out of whole cloth.” At the same time, the biggest IP success story, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, by far the highest-earning franchise of all time, pioneered a production apparatus in which writers were often separated from the conception and creation of a movie’s overall story.

Joanna Robinson, co-author of the book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, told me that the writers for WandaVision, a Marvel show for Disney+, had to craft almost the entirety of the series’ single season without knowing where their work was ultimately supposed to arrive: the ending remained undetermined, because executives had not yet decided what other stories they might spin off from the show.

The streaming ecosystem was built on a wager: high subscriber numbers would translate to large market shares, and eventually, profit. Under this strategy, an enormous amount of money could be spent on shows that might or might not work: more shows meant more opportunities to catch new subscribers. Producers and writers for streamers were able to put ratings aside, which at first seemed to be a luxury. Netflix paid writers large fees up front, and guaranteed that an entire season of a show would be produced. By the mid-2010s, the sheer quantity of series across the new platforms—what’s known as “Peak TV”—opened opportunities for unusually offbeat projects (see BoJack Horseman, a cartoon for adults about an equine has-been sitcom star), and substantially more shows created by women and writers of color. In 2009, across cable, broadcast, and streaming, 189 original scripted shows aired or released new episodes; in 2016, that number was 496. In 2022, it was 849.

supply soon overshot demand. For those who beat out the competition, the work became much less steady than it had been in the pre-streaming era. According to insiders, in the past, writers for a series had usually been employed for around eight months, crafting long seasons and staying on board through a show’s production. Junior writers often went to the sets where their shows were made and learned how to take a story from the page to the screen—how to talk to actors, how to stay within budget, how to take a studio’s notes—setting them up to become showrunners. Now, in an innovation called mini-rooms, reportedly first ventured by cable channels such as AMC and Starz, fewer writers were employed for each series and for much shorter periods—usually eight to ten weeks but as little as four.

Writers in the new mini-room system were often dismissed before their series went to production, which meant that they rarely got the opportunity to go to set and weren’t getting the skills they needed to advance. Showrunners were left responsible for all writing-related tasks when these rooms shut down. “It broke a lot of showrunners,” the A-list film and TV writer told me. “Physically, mentally, financially. It also ruined a lot of shows.”

The price of entry for working in Hollywood had been high for a long time: unpaid internships, low-paid assistant jobs. But now the path beyond the entry level was increasingly unclear. Jason Grote, who was a staff writer on Mad Men and who came to TV from playwriting, told me, “It became like a hobby for people, or something more like theater—you had your other day jobs or you had a trust fund.” Brenden Gallagher, a TV writer a decade in, said, “There are periods of time where I work at the Apple Store. I’ve worked doing data entry, I’ve worked doing research, I’ve worked doing copywriting.” Since he’d started in the business in 2014, in his mid-twenties, he’d never had more than eight months at a time when he didn’t need a source of income from outside the industry.

“There was this feeling,” the head of the midsize studio told me that day at Soho House, “during the last ten years or so, of, ‘Oh, we need to get more people of color in writers’ rooms.’ ” But what you get now, he said, is the black or Latino person who went to Harvard. “They’re getting the shot, but you don’t actually see a widening of the aperture to include people who grew up poor, maybe went to a state school or not even, and are just really talented. That has not happened at all.”

“The Sopranos does not exist without David Chase having worked in television for almost thirty years,” Blake Masters, a writer-producer and creator of the Showtime series Brotherhood, told me. “Because The Sopranos really could not be written by somebody unless they understood everything about television, and hated all of it.” Grote said much the same thing: “Prestige TV wasn’t new blood coming into Hollywood as much as it was a lot of veterans that were never able to tell these types of stories, who were suddenly able to cut through.”

The threshold for receiving the viewership-based streaming residuals is also incredibly high: a show must be viewed by at least 20 percent of a platform’s domestic subscribers “in the first 90 days of release, or in the first 90 days in any subsequent exhibition year.” As Bloomberg reported in November, fewer than 5 percent of the original shows that streamed on Netflix in 2022 would have met this benchmark. “I am not impressed,” the A-list writer told me in January. Entry-level TV staffing, where more and more writers are getting stuck, “is still a subsistence-level job,” he said. “It’s a job for rich kids.”

Brenden Gallagher, who echoed Conover’s belief that the union was well-positioned to gain more in 2026, put it this way: “My view is that there was a lot of wishful thinking about achieving this new middle class, based around, to paraphrase 30 Rock, making it 1997 again through science or magic. Will there be as big a working television-writer cohort that is making six figures a year consistently living in Los Angeles as there was from 1992 to 2021? No. That’s never going to come back.”

As for what types of TV and movies can get made by those who stick around, Kelvin Yu, creator and showrunner of the Disney+ series American Born Chinese, told me: “I think that there will be an industry move to the middle in terms of safer, four-quadrant TV.” (In L.A., a “four-quadrant” project is one that aims to appeal to all demographics.) “I think a lot of people,” he said, “who were disenfranchised or marginalized—their drink tickets are up.” Indeed, multiple writers and executives told me that following the strike, studio choices have skewed even more conservative than before. “It seems like buyers are much less adventurous,” one writer said. “Buyers are looking for Friends.”

The film and TV industry is now controlled by only four major companies, and it is shot through with incentives to devalue the actual production of film and television.

The entertainment and finance industries spend enormous sums lobbying both parties to maintain deregulation and prioritize the private sector. Writers will have to fight the studios again, but for more sweeping reforms. One change in particular has the potential to flip the power structure of the industry on its head: writers could demand to own complete copyright for the stories they create. They currently have something called “separated rights,” which allow a writer to use a script and its characters for limited purposes. But if they were to retain complete copyright, they would have vastly more leverage. Nearly every writer I spoke with seemed to believe that this would present a conflict with the way the union functions. This point is complicated and debatable, but Shawna Kidman and the legal expert Catherine Fisk—both preeminent scholars of copyright and media—told me that the greater challenge is Hollywood’s structure. The business is currently built around studio ownership. While Kidman found the idea of writer ownership infeasible, Fisk said it was possible, though it would be extremely difficult. Pushing for copyright would essentially mean going to war with the studios. But if things continue on their current path, writers may have to weigh such hazards against the prospect of the end of their profession. Or, they could leave it all behind.

Companionship content is long-form content that can be consumed passively — allowing the consumer to be incompletely attentive, and providing a sense of relaxation, comfort, and community.

Interestingly, each individual “unit” of music is short-form (e.g. a 3-5 minute song), but how we consume it tends to be long-form and passive (i.e. via curated stations, lengthy playlists, or algorithms that adapt to our taste).

If you’re rewatching a show or movie, it’s likely to be companionship content. (Life-like conversational sitcoms can be consumed this way too.) As streaming matures, platforms are growing their passive-watch library.

content isn’t always prescriptively passive, rather it’s rooted in how consumers engage it.

That said, some content lends better to being companionship content: Long-form over short. Conversational over action. Simple plot versus complex.

Short-form video requires more attention & action in a few ways: Context switching, i.e. wrapping your head around a new piece of context every 30 seconds, especially if they’re on unrelated topics with different styles Judgment & decision-making, i.e. contemplating whether to keep watching or swipe to the next video effectively the entire time you’re watching a video Multi-sensory attention, i.e. default full-screen and requires visual and audio focus, especially since videos are so short that you can easily lose context Interactive components, e.g. liking, saving, bookmarking,

With how performative, edited, and algorithmically over-optimized it is, TikTok feels sub-human. TikTok has quickly become one of the most goal-seeking places on earth. I could easily describe TikTok as a global focus group for commercials. It’s the product personification of a means to an end, and the end is attention.

even TikTok creators are adapting the historically rigid format to appeal to more companionship-esque emotions and improve retention.

When we search for a YouTube video to watch, we often want the best companion for the next hour and not the most entertaining content.

While short-form content edits are meant to be spectacular and attention-grabbing, long-form content tends to be more subtle in its emotional journey Long-form engagement with any single character or narrative or genre lets you develop stronger understanding, affinity, and parasocial bonds Talk-based content (e.g. talk shows, podcasts, comedy, vlogs, life-like sitcoms) especially evokes a feeling of companionship and is less energy-draining The trends around loneliness and the acceleration of remote work has and will continue to make companionship content even more desirable As we move into new technology frontiers, we might unlock novel types of companionship content itself, but I’d expect this to take 5-10 years at least

TikTok is where you connect with an audience, YouTube is where you consolidate it.5 Long-form content also earns creators more, with YouTube a standout in revenue sharing.

YouTube paid out $16 billion to creators in 2022 (which is 55% of its annual $30 billion in revenue) and the other four social networks paid out about $1 billion each from their respective creator funds. In total, that yields $20 billion.”

Mr. Beast, YouTube’s top creator, says YouTube is now the final destination, not “traditional” hollywood stardom which is the dream of generations past. Creators also want to funnel audiences to apps & community platforms where they can own user relationships, rely less on algorithms, engage more directly and deeply with followers, and enable follower-to-follower engagement too

Interestingly of course, an increasing amount of short-form video, including formats like clips and edits, seems to be made from what originally was long-form content.8 And in return, these recycled short-form videos can drive tremendous traffic to long-form formats and platforms.

90% of people use a second screen while watching TV. We generally talk about “second screen” experiences in the context of multiple devices, but you can have complementary apps and content running on the same device — you can have the “second screen” on the same screen.

YouTube itself also cites a trend of people putting YouTube on their real TV screens: “There are more Americans gathering around the living room TV to watch YouTube than any other platform. Why? Put simply, people want choices and variety … It’s a one stop shop for video viewing. Think about something historically associated with linear TV: Sports. Now, with [our NFL partnership], people can not only watch the games, but watch post-game highlights and commentary in one place.”

If I were to build an on-demand streaming product or any kind of content product for that matter, I’d build for the companionship use case — not only because I think it has a higher ceiling of consumer attention, but also because it can support more authentic, natural, human engagement.

All the creators that are ‘made’ on TikTok are looking for a place to go to consolidate the attention they’ve amassed. TikTok is commercials. YouTube is TV. (Though yes, they’re both trying to become each other).

certainly AI and all the new creator tools enabled by it will help people mix and match and remix long and short formats all day, blurring the historically strict distinctions between them. It’ll take some time before we see a new physical product + content combo thrive, and meanwhile the iPhone and its comps will be competing hard to stay the default device.

The new default seems to be that we’re not lonely as long as we’re streaming. We can view this entirely in a negative light and talk about how much the internet and media is contributing to the loneliness epidemic. Or we could think about how to create media for good. Companionship content can be less the quick dopamine-hit-delivering clips and more of this, and perhaps even truly social.

Long-form wants to become the conversational third space for consumers too. The “comments” sections of TikTok, YouTube and all broadcast platforms are improving, but they still have a long way to go before they become even more community-oriented.

I’m not an “AI-head” but I am more curious about what it’s going to enable in long-form content than all the short-form clips it’s going to help generate and illustrate, etc.

The foreground tends to be utilities or low-cognitive / audio effort (text or silent video). Tiktok is a foreground app for now, YouTube is both (and I’d say trending towards being background).

Indeed, the rise of hyperindividualism has fragmented our connections, scattering our relationships across the country. Even today’s modern self-care trends turn us inward, convincing us to “hyperfocus on ourselves at the expense of connecting with others.” And the numbers don’t lie: Americans are spending more and more time alone and less and less time with their friends.

When asked how often they decide not to post on social media out of fear of it being using against them, older teen girls stand out. For example, half of 15- to 17-year-old girls say they often or sometimes decide not to post something on social media because they worry others might use it to embarrass them, compared with smaller shares of younger girls or boys.

While 9% of teens think social media has had a mostly negative effect on them personally, that share rises to 32% when the same question is framed about people their age.

this survey reveals that only a minority of teens say they have been civically active on social media in the past year via one of the three means asked about at the time of the survey. One-in-ten teens say they have encouraged others to take action on political or social issues that are important to them or have posted a picture to show their support for a political or social issue in the past 12 months.

larger shares of Democrats than Republicans say they have posted pictures or used hashtags to show support for a political or social issue in the past year. In total, Democratic teens are twice as likely as Republican teens to have engaged in any of these activities during this time (20% vs. 10%).

Not only do small shares of teens participate in these types of activities on social media, relatively few say these platforms play a critical role in how they interact with political and social issues.

18% of Democratic teens say social media is extremely or very important to them when it comes to exposing them to new points of view, compared with 8% of Republican teens.

Despite feeling a lack of control over their data being collected by social media companies, teens are largely unconcerned. A fifth of teens (20%) say they feel very or extremely concerned about the amount of their personal information social media companies might have. Still, a notable segment of teens – 44% – say they have little or no concern about how much these companies might know about them.