Social Media as a Shaper, Enabler, and Hurdle in Youth Political Participation

This chapter explores young people’s political participation on and with social media from an ecosystemic perspective. Drawing from an analysis of interviews, ethnographic social media observations, and digital storytelling workshops conducted in Estonia, Greece, and the United Kingdom, we highlight the entanglement of young people’s participatory repertoires with social media, but also with their leisure and school lives and family relationships. We explore how young people invested in issues of racial justice, gender and LGBTQ justice, and climate justice, incorporate or push back against digital technologies, and how that is mediated by their perceptions of social media affordances, imaginary audiences, their sense of self-efficacy, political agency, and digital literacies. The findings shed light on the complex interplay between personal, structural, and environmental factors that shape young people’s political participation, and highlight the situational nature of how activism and politics are defined and the role that social media is attributed within both.