For some people, social media is inconsequential — a cat photo here, a banana slip TikTok there. For others, it’s all-consuming — a helpless catapult into a slurry of anxiety, self-harm and depression.

To each his own internet.

Still, we can make some generalizations about the impact. We know social media use can harm mental health. We know that this disproportionately affects young people. Both the surgeon general and the American Psychological Association put out related health advisories this year. And we know that girls, who use social media more than boys, are disproportionately affected.

But social media use also differs by race and ethnicity — and there’s far less discussion of that. According to a new study by Pew, Black and Hispanic teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 spend far more time on most social media apps than their white peers. One in three Hispanic teens, for example, say they are “almost constantly” on TikTok, compared with one in five Black teenagers and one in 10 white teenager. Higher percentages of Hispanic (27 percent) and Black teenagers (23 percent) are almost constantly on YouTube compared with white teenagers (9 percent); the same trend is true for Instagram.

Overall, 55 percent of Hispanic teenagers and 54 percent of Black teenagers say they are online almost constantly, compared with 38 percent of white teenagers; Black and Hispanic kids between ages 8 and 12, another study found, also use social media more than their white counterparts.

What we don’t fully understand yet is why.

But it’s important to discern the reasons behind these differences and explore the implications, especially given that earlier research on social media use, according to some researchers, focused almost exclusively on white teenagers.

“For these kids to be stuck to a computer is concerning,” Amanda Calhoun, a clinical fellow at the Yale Child Study Center who studies race and digital media, told me.