Even as the share of people in the smartphone overdependence risk group declined overall, it rose among teenagers to 43 percent, data showed.

The Ministry of Science and ICT on Wednesday released the findings in its "2025 Survey on the Digital Information Gap, Web Accessibility and Smartphone Overdependence."

The overall smartphone overdependence risk-group share was 22.7 percent, down 0.2 percentage points from a year earlier, extending a fifth straight annual decline since 2021, when it stood at 24.2 percent. Teenagers aged 10 to 19 came in at 43.0 percent, up 0.4 points from a year earlier. The figure for children aged 3 to 9 also rose slightly to 26.0 percent. The ministry analysed that the spread of short-form content and increased use of generative AI services, among other factors, had an impact.

The level of information access among digitally vulnerable groups improved for a fifth straight year to 77.9 percent of that of the general public. The average web accessibility score for 1,000 websites was 70.4 points, up 3.7 points from a year earlier.

Hong Seong-wan (홍성완), director general for ICT policy at the ministry, said, "We will do our best to build a healthy digitally inclusive society centred on the Digital Inclusion Act."