Teenage Chat Trends Are Kinda Weird

Hello, this is TheTechBoy with a special article.

Hey, look a green bubble. Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash 

    At my school, I have noticed that teenagers use Snapchat to communicate with each other; some use Instagram, and even some use TikTok (which is insanely weird when you think about it). This begs the question: why?

    Why are social media applications being used to chat with friends when SMS is free? Why are they not using dedicated WiFi-based chat applications such as WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal? It is not because a phone call is intimate; Instagram and Snapchat allow you to call people. It is not for security reasons, as Snapchat is not end-to-end encrypted (and messages can be viewed on any device, unlike SMS), and I doubt the teens are worried about SS7-based tracking...

    One actual messaging application has broken through to teens, but it costs 1000 dollars to enter and can be hard to leave. Of course, I am talking about iMessage, the Apple-only chat application. Maybe these applications are weird and aren't appealing to them, but would a teen rather use TikTok to communicate than WhatsApp? Will YouTube have a chat functionality (I would not put it past Google)? I get why they would use Instagram/Snapchat if they don't really know the person, but having it be the texting app of choice by many at my school is kind of insane.

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