At a recent Santa event for neighborhood kids, I saw a trend on display that researchers have been tracking.
The digital divide hasn’t closed. It has flipped.
Inside a community center decorated with Christmas lights, families from a range of backgrounds crowded a long table of activities. A dozen kids were in some stage of engagement with one screen or another, tablets and phones and games. Autoplay videos were on order for most, except, as I shared in a recent social video, for a few of the families.
Twenty years ago, it was the wealthier kids who had all the devices. Now the situation appears reversed.
Pew Research Center’s latest survey of US teens backs this up: 58% of Hispanic teens and 53% of Black teens said they were online “almost constantly,” according to the December 2024 study, compared with 37% of white teens.
The racial disparity appears to follow income patterns. Increasingly, poorer American kids are more likely to spend time with screens than richer ones.
Teens in households earning under $30,000 were more likely to use TikTok (73%) than those in households earning $75,000 or more (59%), per the Pew report. Teens in households with lower incomes also reported higher use of Facebook.
This is a reversal from years of digital access policymaking, long focused on getting a bigger swath of Americans online at lower costs and with faster speeds. Challenges remain, especially in rural counties, hence the focus of the federal BEAD program, but in most urban districts, online access is no longer the obstacle.
Advocates call this an emerging need for online literacy: the idea that the challenge isn’t just getting kids connected, but ensuring they know how to navigate the digital world once they’re there.
Access used to define the divide. Today, it may be agency.
