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News consumption and political participation of young people in new media – a narrative literature review
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Instagram and TikTok constitute the fastest rising social media apps for news consumption. However, very little remains known on how young people encounter and experience news content on these platforms. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with young adult Belgians, including operationalising the walkthrough method, this qualitative research article fills this existing gap in scholarship. I contextualise but also nuance how younger users are accustomed to relying on third-party social media apps as the primary location to encounter news rather than news outlets' own offline and online platforms. The study results also shine light on intriguing perception differences in young adults' varying news expectations of Instagram and TikTok, based on which ramifications and recommendations are discussed. Conceptually, I propose adopting the terms encountering and experiencing news rather than being exposed to or trusting it, in order to highlight the acknowledged (radical) audience turn in journalism studies and practice.
News outlets increasingly create and disseminate news content specifically for social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. Academia has thus far not given this trend the attention it deserves, with empirical and mostly conceptual contributions lacking. This chapter fills the established gap in scholarship by proposing an analytical framework that identifies social media journalism as the production, diffusion, and consumption of social media platform-bound news content. It is to be seen as the successor of print, broadcast, and digital journalism, although the chapter also argues that all four waves are occurring simultaneously rather than consecutively. In turn, this poses issues for four distinguished actors: media practitioners, media users, media regulators and media researchers.
This research aims to identify values related to political and civic participation methods among the two groups of radicalised youngsters: native youth who support movements labelled as far-right (N= 122) and migrant-origin self-identified Muslim youth with strong organisational ties with religious communities (N=109) in Germany, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. The study posits that these these radically aligned youngsters position themselves against politically moderate European citizens, who are less intuitive when making judgements on political affairs comparing to them. Diverging from the unifying European values and hypersensitivities, these youngsters’ political reactions are often radical and loud in their safe-to-speak, segregated movements. By using the narrations of the range of mainstream modes of political participation, the current qualitative research asks what appears valuable for the two groups of young people to express their political discontent. Findings revealed that both groups highlighted similar values regarding voting. Self-identified Muslim youth stressed the importance of volunteering and street protests (despite not having participated in one). Many native youths, on the other hand, stressed the function of unlawful behaviour in street protests to pursue political objectives. The findings such as these are discussed considering the group differences.
Afforded by the unprecedented interactivity of social media, social media influencers (SMI) can build strong and trusting relationships with their followers. Such connections carry great potential and may be a powerful asset for political campaigns. Drawing on the existing literature on parasocial relationships (PSR) and political persuasion, we examined the effect of source factors and PSR on followers’ perceived message quality, receptivity, and sharing intention in a political advocacy context. An online survey of 390 U.S. university students showed that, in general, SMIs who engage in sharing political messages would influence a young audience’s opinion formation. Our findings offered a unique and significant perspective: source characteristics of expertise, similarity, trustworthiness, attractiveness, and interactivity will foster parasocial relationships, which leads to a higher level of perceived information quality, and then further predicts higher receptivity toward the SMI’s political advocacy and elicits the followers’ sharing intention.
There are grounds to assume that the use nonpolitical, entertainment-oriented Social Media (SM) may dampen democratically relevant outcomes. However, research has largely ignored the political effects of such entertainment-oriented SM content as well as its interaction with exposure to political SM content. Based on the distinction between political and entertainment-oriented SM use, we developed a fourfold theoretical typology, “the Inactive”, “the News Avoiders”, “the Distracted”, and “the Focused”. Using data from a two-wave panel study (N = 559), we found that “the Focused” scored highest while the “the Inactive” and the “the News Avoiders” scored lowest on democratically relevant outcomes. Autoregressive panel analyses further revealed a positive effect of political SM exposure on low-effort political participation, but not on high-effort participation, political interest, and knowledge over time. Exposure to entertainment-oriented content on SM was associated with a decrease in high-effort political participation over time. For low-effort participation and political interest, the over-time effect of political SM exposure was dampened with rising levels of entertainment-oriented SM exposure, confirming the distraction effect. Implications are discussed.
Inspired by the forceful emergence of youth activism around climate change in 2019 and the body of scholarship on youth political involvement, we evaluate youths’ claims to being political in the international climate governance process. To do this, we survey documentation of youth activity around the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), so we can gauge the extent of youth participation. We produce analyses of four sets of records: mainstream newspapers, UNFCCC programming, independent media outlets and youth NGO websites. We find that, while youth are participating more, existing forms of documentation are inadequate. We suggest that genre writing can capture lost voices in politics, and that standard documentation remains critically important to recording youth political participation.
This study aimed to understand young adults' attitudes concerning news and news resources they consumed, and how they encounter the fake news phenomenon. A qualitative approach was used with semi-structured interviews with 41 young adults (aged 20-30) in Tehran, Iran. Findings revealed that about half of the participants favored social media, and a smaller group used traditional media and only a few maintained that traditional and modern media should be used together. News quality was considered to be lower on social media than in traditional news sources. Furthermore, young adults usually followed the news related to the issues which had impact on their daily life, and they typically tended to share news. To detect fake news, they checked several media to compare the information; and profiteering and attracting audiences' attention were the most important reasons for the existence of fake news. This is the first qualitative study for understanding news consumption behavior of young adults in a politicized society.
[In press; article accepted on May 20, 2022] The rapid rise of digital media use for political participation has coincided with an increase in concerns about citizens' sense of their capacity to impact political processes. These dual trends raise the important question of how people's online political participation is connected to perceptions of their own capacity to participate in and influence politics. The current study overcomes the limitation of scarce high-quality cross-national and overtime data on these topics by conducting a meta-analysis of all extant studies that analyze how political efficacy relates to both online and offline political participation using data sources in which all variables were measured simultaneously. We identified and coded 48 relevant studies (with 184 effects) representing 51,860 respondents from 28 countries based on surveys conducted between 2000 and 2016. We conducted a multilevel random effects meta-analysis to test the main hypothesis of whether political efficacy has a weaker relationship with online political participation than offline political participation. The findings show positive relationships between efficacy and both forms of participation, with no distinction in the magnitude of the two associations. In addition, we tested hypotheses about the expected variation across time and democratic contexts, and the results suggest contextual variation for offline participation but cross-national stability for online participation. The findings provide the most comprehensive evidence to date that online participation is as highly associated with political efficacy as offline participation, and that the strength of this association for online political participation is stable over time and across diverse country contexts.
Legacy news consumption was found to be a predictor of getting news from social media influencers among respondents in seven nationally representative samples in Arab countries (N=5,166). Getting news from SMIs does not seem to be an “alternative” for persons disenchanted with legacy media; SMI news use may, itself, be a form of legacy news consumption. The results provide strong evidence of the more-and-more phenomenon first identified by Lazarsfeld et al. (1944).
Creativity plays an important role in politics in both online and offline spaces. Creative forms of political participation have long been tools of disenfranchised groups in their efforts to influence the government. Further, the rise of online creative participatory cultures has afforded new opportunities for civic and political involvement. Creative forms of participatory politics have the potential to facilitate exposure to ideas, foster dialogues, influence agendas and serve as ways to back talk authority. While many avenues for political involvement are creative, the role creativity may play in citizens’ political engagement is not well understood. This study examined the role of creative self-efficacy in political engagement and civic outcomes. Creative self-efficacy represents a belief in one’s ability to produce creative outcomes. A survey of participants living in Australia, South Korea, the Philippines and the USA (USA, Hawaii and Guam) ( N = 807) was conducted. Findings suggest that creative self-efficacy was positively associated with political efficacy and scepticism and not associated with apathy. Creative self-efficacy was indirectly associated with offline and online political participation through political efficacy. The implications of these findings are discussed in context of the role creative self-efficacy may play in impacting political outcomes.
Early adolescents’ insufficient critical engagement with (online) news demands increased application of news literacy, but it remains unclear which factors increase news literacy application. To provide more insights, this survey study develops and tests a model of news literacy application in early adolescents (12‒15 y/o, N = 492). The more comprehensive model looks at the relationship between the application of news literacy and news consumption, knowledge of news media production, news literacy skills, value for (news) media literacy, news literacy and news consumption motivation, social norms, and demographics. Most importantly, the model shows the interconnectedness of news literacy application and news consumption. Furthermore, it shows the importance of early adolescents’ value for (news) media literacy, skills, and motivation to increase their news literacy application, and the lesser importance of news production knowledge. To stimulate the application of news literacy in early adolescents, researchers and practitioners could take a stepwise approach: (1) stimulate intrinsic news consumption motivation and, with that, news consumption, and then (2) build value for (news) media literacy, skills, and peer social norms to stimulate the application of news literacy. In precisely targeting these factors of news literacy application, interventions can empower early adolescents to become more critical news consumers.
Social unrest and division within the United States has become more visible and magnified since the 2016 election of former President Trump. This unrest has been amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic and white supremist attacks across the country. Throughout this era, information has been perpetuated through systemic and cultural networks promoting pseudoscience, #fakenews, misinformation, and explicit marginalization of racial, gender, ethnic, and cultural minorities. During this time, social work practitioners and educators have struggled to counter misinformation in classrooms and practice contexts. This paper proposes a newly re-imagined framework for addressing misinformation and civil discourse in social work education through the adoption and infusion of digital and new media literacies from within a critical theory driven epistemological framework. Recommendations are provided for incorporating tools, skills, and competencies throughout the curriculum in a more meaningful way that will help the profession combat misinformation, promote civil discourse, and utilize best practices in a digitally augmented society. Only then will the social work profession be able to meet the current and future challenges and opportunities that will undoubtedly accompany the expansion of digital technologies throughout our society.
According to lifestyle politics theory, social media platforms introduce new ways for people to engage in civic life. Based on the communication mediation model, prior scholarship laid out theoretical and empirical foundations for how media exposure to the news positively influences people’s political participatory behavior through supplemental communicative processes. Building on this line of research, we rely on a two-wave panel survey of U.S. adults to examine how the different online and social media communicative patterns among U.S. citizens, such as news use, political expression, and discussion, predict political consumerism behavior - the purchase decision of consumers based on political or ethical reasons. Advancing diverse causal order structural equation models, this study highlights a positive influence of news consumption, social media political expression, and political discussion in explaining political consumerism (i.e., boycotting and buycotting). Specifically, results underscore the importance of political expression and discussion mediating the relationship between online, social media and WhatsApp news use and political consumerism. Implications for future research and limitations to the study are provided in the manuscript.
This study focused on the frequency of social media use. Through investigating and verifying the correlations between social media use frequency, online political participation, and social capital, we derived two models of socialization that affect citizen well-being and, accordingly, proposed strategic suggestions for democratic society construction and network management. This study drew upon the 2019 Taiwan Communication Survey database and used structural equation modeling (SEM) as a statistical method to explore the causal relationship between these four variables (social media use, online political participation, social capital and well-being). The data analysis yielded an overall good fit with the overall fit indicators: χ² = 214.417, df = 84, p = 2.293, RMSEA = 0.028, GFI = 0.998, CFI = 0.986, SRMR = 0.066, and CN = 993.411. Future communication scholars who wish to explore issues related to new media users can draw on this model for subsequent research.
Younger and older generations are differently motivated in relation to news consumption and online political expression. In this paper, we suggest that different modes of citizenship characterize younger and older generations. To test the differential role of political interest in news consumption and online political expression, we use a survey of 3,210 people from the United States, 3,043 from the United Kingdom, and 3,031 from France. Our findings suggest that young citizens are more frequent users of online news overall and that the rank order of different news activities replicates cross-nationally. The frequency of online political expression is negatively related to age, with older people less likely to post online. Age moderates the relationship between political interest and news consumption as well as news consumption and online political expression. The correlations of these sets of variables are stronger for younger respondents compared to older respondents. These findings hold across the three countries under study. We explain these patterns in terms of changing citizenship norms and discuss the implications for democracy.
The advent of online technologies has been triggering a wave of empirical examinations of online political participation (OPP) over the past twenty years. It also stimulated scholarly debate on how to conceptualize political participation in a digital age. Scholars differ on whether to consider passive and expressive online behaviors part of or a mere precursor to political participation. This study argues that due to its rapid evolution as well as its dependence on platform affordances, quantitative empirical studies on OPP may be prone to deviations between established, much-cited definitions and measurements applied in the field. Based on a systematic literature review of 289 international peer-reviewed survey-based and experimental studies, we analyze both definitions and measurements of OPP. We find a series of disconnections: Measures preponderantly address online activities, yet merely a small share of definitions focuses on the online sphere. While only few definitions account for passive activities (e.g., reading news about politics), many operationalizations include measures capturing such passive behaviors. Expressive activities are most popular in measures of OPP, but definitions rarely reflect this focus. Finally, while measures of OPP are prone to be platform-specific, definitions tend to neglect this characteristic. We conclude by reflecting the conceptual implications of common measurement practices for the study of OPP.
Social media have become indispensable tools for (legacy) news companies and brands to increase online traffic for their own platforms. A recent trend is the production and dissemination of native news content specifically for and through platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. This paper uses a mixed methods research design to study the news production and content of @nws.nws.nws, a hugely popular Instagram channel targeting 13-17-year olds in Flanders (Belgium) which is maintained by the newsroom of VRT, the Flemish PSM. The explorative study highlights the differences in journalistic practice when producing news content for online platforms only and the changes it entails for traditional news values, dependency on social media platforms and media regulation.
In this article, we explore the relationship between social media use and participation in protests in Chile. In October 2019, Chile faced the most massive protests since the country’s return to democracy. Due to its magnitude, the media and analysts refer to this process as the “social outburst.” Although these protests engaged broad sectors of the population, most of the protesters were young people. Using a probabilistic and face-to-face survey applied to young people aged 18-29 years, we find that the only social media platform associated with participation in protests was Facebook. Our analysis also shows the importance of the specific activities that people engage in social media. Taking part in political activities on social media is strongly associated with attending protests but using social media platforms to get information or share common interests with other users is not. Furthermore, we examine whether social media has an indirect impact on participation through interpersonal conversation. The results show that Instagram—one of the most popular social media platforms among young Chileans—spurs interpersonal conversation, which in turn increases the likelihood of participating in protests. Our findings suggest that social media still plays a role in shaping people’s political behavior despite changes in the social media environment and in social media consumption patterns.
TikTok has taken the world of mobile apps by storm. In a short period of time, it managed to become the destination of choice for most of the young users and it is currently witnessing the aging of its audience. Mass media has started to test the TikTok waters early in 2019. However, there are still very few TV news channels daring to take the risks and try to lure the TikTok audience to television news. In this article we are evaluating the field of TikTok news players and the platform’s potential to become another popular source of serious information. We are closely analyzing the top two accounts of traditional TV news on TikTok: NBC News and CBS News. As it turns out, there is room for traditional TV formats and adapted for TikTok news bits. Politics remains one of the most demanded by the audience topics. And even though young users emphasize the importance of brevity and entertainment aspect for any potential TV news videos on TikTok, our study results show that even serious and least entertaining videos can get millions of likes and views.
This paper contributes to the literature by examining gender inequalities in political participation and political engagement among young people from a comparative perspective. By analyzing data on young people from nine European countries collected in 2018, we examine gender inequalities in participation in various modes of conventional and unconventional activism as well as related attitudes, broader political engagement and key determinants, cross-nationally, in order to provide a detailed picture of the current state of gender inequalities in political activism among young people in Europe. Our results allow us to speak to extant theorizing about gender inequalities by showing that the extent of political inequality between young men and women is less marked than one might expect. While the gender gaps in political participation for activities such as confrontational types of protest are small or absent, we find that young women are actually more active in petitioning, buycotting, and volunteering in the community. Young men instead are more active than young women in a majority of the nine countries analysed with respect to more institutional forms of participation linked to organizations and parties, various types of online political participation, and broader political engagement measures, such as internal political efficacy and consumption of political news through various channels. However, young men also appear to be more sceptical at least of certain aspects of democratic practice relative to young women.
Although the phenomenon of disinformation and, specifically, fake news has become especially serious and problematic, this phenomenon has not been widely addressed in academia from the perspective of consumers, who play a relevant role in the spread of this content. For that reason, the present study focuses on determining how this phenomenon is perceived by citizens, as the strategies to counteract fake news are affected by such opinions. Thus, the main objective of this study was to identify in which media the perception and experience of fake news is greatest and thus determine what platforms should be focused on to counteract this phenomenon. A survey was conducted in October 2020, among the Spanish adult population and was completed by a total of 423 people (with 421 valid answers). Among its main findings, this study determined that social media platforms are the type of media in which the greatest amount of fake news is perceived, which confirms the suggestions of previous studies. Furthermore, the experienced presence of fake news seems to be primarily affected by age and gender, as there was a higher level of skepticism observed among young people and women. Additionally, the use of media seems to be positively correlated with the perceived and experienced presence of fake news.
In this study, we examine how political party preference and politically active social media use associate with social media behaviors – namely, conformist, provocative, and protective – in the context of the current political sphere in Finland. In our empirical analysis, we use a nationally representative dataset collected from 3,724 Finnish citizens in 2018. Our research confirms the assumption that there are notable differences in the social media behaviors of the supporters of different political parties. Additionally, our research shows that politically active social media use increases the occurrence for all three aforementioned behaviors. The study’s results also confirm that major differences in online behavior exist among the new identity parties’ supporters, who rely heavily on post-materialist and neoconservative political values.
This article investigates the impact of intolerance on online political participation among young Europeans. Based on the theoretical insights of (in)tolerance, political participation, youth, and media studies, we explore whether and to what extent intolerant attitudes drive young people’s online political participation. In doing this, we draw on original survey data with booster samples for young people, covering nine European countries. Our results show that intolerance leads to more online political activities among young people. However, these individuals are not socially isolated and marginalised; in fact, the effect of intolerant attitudes on online political engagement is reinforced by participation in offline unconventional forms of participation and social capital. Our findings bear important consequences for the understanding of intolerant attitudes, youth politics, and (online) political participation.
Entrenched inequalities in political participation have made the questions of who participates and when, why, or how some of the most frequently asked and researched in political science. Building on existing comparative research, this article focuses on civic education in English secondary schools and, in particular, the ability of related interventions to close participation gaps normally seen by sex, ethnicity and socio-economic status. Analysing original survey data collected from more than 350 students in 17 maintained secondary schools located in six regions of England, this article evaluates the impact of four types of civic education (curricula lessons; open classroom climate; participatory activities; and political contact) on three participatory outcomes (expressive political behaviours; voting intentions; and anticipated high-intensity participation). Descriptive and inferential analyses suggest (a) cumulative quantities of civic education are positively associated with youth political participation; (b) open classroom climate may close known inequalities in young people’s expressive and electoral participation whilst political contact with politicians and political institutions may widen those inequalities; and (c) civic education may currently accelerate inequalities in young people’s political ambition. These findings raise important and immediate challenges for policy makers who are concerned with improving young people’s civic engagement in England and elsewhere.
This paper assesses the impact of age and ideological identification on the left–right scale on the use of online social networks to acquire political information. Socio-demographic indicators and ideological identification have been found to impact democratic engagement and the access and use of social networks. In countries where the digital divide (access to the internet) and digital inequality (use of the internet) coexist, the impact of socio-demographic indicators is stronger, as those with fewer tools and resources have less access and make less use of social networks for democratic engagement. We postulate three hypotheses on the effect of socio-demographic determinants and ideological identification and test them using 6 national polls conducted between 2017 and 2019 in Chile, a middle-income country with high levels of inequality. Though socio-demographic variables and ideological identification impact the use of social networks to acquire political information, young people who do not identify on the ideological scale are as likely to use social networks to obtain political information as older people who identify on the left–right scale. As generational replacement kicks in, online democratic engagement will become more intense. Even the non-ideological youth is more politically engaged than the ideologically identified older age cohorts.
This Special Issue of “TikTok and Social Movements” emerges from an attempt to map out the landscape of social movements happening on TikTok, drawing from the online symposium “TikTok and Social Movements” hosted in September 2021 by the TikTok Cultures Research Network, a research portal for interdisciplinary scholarship on TikTok cultures. The recent growing popularity of TikTok has transformed the cultures and practices of social movements worldwide. Through the platform’s participatory affordances, many users find meaningful ways to engage with the platform and its cultures, by leading and participating in a variety of activist initiatives for global awareness, social change, and civic politics. Within this context, this introduction to the Special Issue titled “TikTok and Social Movements” begins by thinking about how social media pop cultures have served as a vehicle for mobilizing and engaging in social movements for social (in)justice and politics in the era of social media. By situating TikTok, a nascent platform and culture of short video, within the ongoing discussion of digitally mobilized movements and social justice, this introduction addresses several crucial points to consider when discussing TikTok cultures and social movements that are happening or interrupted on the platform. These points are interrogated with more details and cultural contexts in the five case studies and three expert commentaries in this Special Issue. Specifically, the collection of papers interrogate how TikTok’s interactive and creative affordances have augmented and altered our cultures, practices, politics, and power dynamics of engaging with publics for various beliefs and social agendas.
TikTok is a critical platform for political campaigns seeking to engage with new publics through digital advocacy. Jagmeet Singh, the leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, has emerged as a TikTok celebrity since establishing his profile in 2019. At the time of writing, he is the only Canadian federal party leader using TikTok with his interactions greatly surpassing those on his other social media profiles. Strategically utilizing TikTok to promote his social justice-oriented political platform and to build momentum in preparation for a snap election, his digital campaign has received extensive attention from the Canadian press. Through qualitative content analysis of his videos and news media coverage of Singh’s activity on TikTok, this article questions how his TikTok profile thematically engages with social democratic politics within the context of the permanent campaign. Attention is directed toward how Singh employs TikTok’s features to establish his brand of left-wing populism and advocate against systematic social inequality to appeal to TikTok’s youthful demographic.
Influencers, characterized by their social-media-made fame, are known for endorsing brands, but are also producing political content, which has been shown to resonate with youth. However, research on how their political messages impact young people’s political involvement is still scarce. To address this lacuna, we conducted a two-wave panel study (NW2 = 496) among youth aged 16 to 25 years to investigate links between following political influencers, young people’s internal political efficacy, and political participation. We draw from the two-step flow of communication and opinion leadership literature to explain influencers’ impact on young people’s political behavior. Moreover, we advance the theoretical argument that influencers may not only relay political news, but also render it more comprehensible for youth. Influencers may thereby raise young people’s confidence in their political self-competence, and consequently affect their level of political participation. We find that followers’ internal political efficacy is predicted by following political influencers at moderate to high levels of perceived simplification of politics by influencers. However, there is no link between internal political efficacy and political participation, which may be explained by influencers’ direct and short-term mobilizing effect on young people. Overall, our findings have important theoretical implications for contemporary understandings of opinion leadership in mediated contexts.
Young people’s increasing dependence on social media for news demands increasing levels of news literacy, leading to a rise in media literacy programs that aim to support youth’s abilities to critically and mindfully navigate news. However, being news literate does not necessarily mean such knowledge and skills are applied in practice. This article starts from young people’s own news practices and experiences on social media to explore when news literacy becomes meaningful in the practice of everyday life. Based on in-depth interviews with 36 young people aged 16–22, it explores what strategies and tactics they employ to access, evaluate, or engage with news. It argues that such practices can be considered as expressions of news literacy, through which young people negotiate platform structures and norms taught in media education. Moreover, it reconceptualizes news literacy as a form of situated knowledge, emphasizing how platform and social contexts shape users’ attitudes, motivations, and perceptions of agency.
This study explores and discusses the impact of political talks as a mediator of social media use on online political participation. It uses a survey method to collect data on college students in West Java concerning the 2019 Indonesian presidential election, and a total of 1,050 students filled out the questionnaires. The results showed that online political talk served as a mediator instead of face-to-face political talks. Furthermore, politics and social media use positively affected online political participation. Concerning the implication of this study, social media can be a means of political discussion to increase participation among youth, especially college students
The U.S. House of Representatives has one of the oldest pools of politicians in the world today: the average member of the House is 58 years at the time of their election, which is about 20 years older than the average American. But why are younger adults scarce among these representatives? Here we trace the relative absence of youth in both the primary and general elections of 2020 using a supply and demand framework. Our study finds that (1) the average candidate is much older than the average citizen and (2) young candidates perform less well than older candidates in both primaries and general elections. These results suggest that youth are disadvantaged because the two main parties do not nominate enough younger adults as candidates for winnable and safe seats. Young adults also seem to be disadvantaged indirectly at the electoral stage because they lack electoral capital (experience in running for and holding office) and tend to suffer strongly from the incumbency advantage of their opponents. We infer from these findings that barring reforms to rules governing minimum candidate ages and term limits, the under-representation of youth in U.S. national-level politics will continue for the foreseeable future.
[Abstract]
The present study aims to investigate pathways to political participation among children and youth. From the perspective of the cognitive mediation model, we attempt to analyze youth participation by considering two socializing factors (i.e., school education for media literacy and family intervention for technology use) as external antecedents to the intrinsic process of cognitive mediation involving surveillance motivation, elaboration/reflection, and engagement. Our extended cognitive mediation model on youth participation is tested with national survey data collected in South Korea with the use of a multistage random sampling technique. Results show that media literacy education and parental mediation nurture surveillance motivation, and indirectly increase youth participation through motivation, reflection, and online news engagement. Implications for the cognitive mediation model and youth participation are discussed.
News media in Switzerland are confronted with the challenge of not reaching young people, as youth-specific news platforms and formats are not used by the target group. Our study aims to determine how and where young people can be reached with news. It uses a mixed methods approach to analyze the expectations of young people towards news content and formats and to determine their news consumption patterns. The results show that young people’s news consumption is characterized by four dimensions: 1. duration and times of consumption, 2. news consumption habits and behavior, 3. restrictions, 4. media literacy. The significance of these dimensions varies between three age groups determined through the study. The news consumption of the 12-to-14 year-olds is strongly restricted by parents and school. This group consumes news mainly through media available at home. In the group of 15- to-17 year-olds, parental influence and restrictions decrease, while peer influence increases. This age group spends a lot of time on social media platforms where young people stumble upon news rather accidentally. Between 18 and 20 years of age, news consumption stabilizes, and individual patterns emerge. This age group accesses news via selected apps and social media channels. Young people in Switzerland prefer visual formats like pictures, videos, and memes. When scrolling through social media platforms, they come across news content which arouses their interest in certain information and leads them to search for it on media websites. Swiss Youth wants to be informed about relevant news or topics that are “in vogue”.
Social media have become important sources of news yet existing research has not paid much attention to types of social media news usage and platforms. This study examines how types of news usage on social media across different platforms are associated with online and offline civic and political engagement. In doing so, this study conducts a secondary analysis of survey data from a representative sample of South Korea (N = 5,010) collected by the Korea Press Foundation. This study found that types of social media news usage are differentially related to participatory behaviors. Specifically, informational use was not significantly or negatively related, whereas relational and expressive use were positively related to civic and political engagement behaviors. Moreover, different social media platforms played a role in shaping the types of social media news usage and participatory behaviors with online video platforms being most beneficial. Based on these findings, this study concludes that motivating people to share, react to or comment on news is key to deepening civic and political engagement. However, how platform-specific affordances or norms either facilitate or dampen the engagement process must be considered.
Though politics and promotion have never been completely separate, the convergence between the two spheres is increasingly prominent in today’s digital culture. To broaden our understanding of such promotional politics in social media, this paper examines commercial collaborations between four Swedish influencers and two private companies that offer services enabled by specific neoliberal reforms during recent decades, and how they strive to present these services in a way that attracts an affluent but socially conscious middle-class. It argues that the political potential of influencers might not always be as spokespersons for a cause or party, but rather as ‘ideological intermediaries’ who promote a lifestyle to be inspired by, and aspire to. The analysis identifies the discourses that influencers draw on to achieve the promotional and ideological outcomes of commercial collaborations, as well as the authenticity labour that they perform in the texts. Further, the paper analyses how notions of authenticity also impact audiences’ interpretation and politicization of the collaborations, in the comment sections to the sponsored blogposts.
Concern over misinformation on social media has amplified calls to improve the public’s knowledge about how news is produced, distributed and financed. This study investigates the relationship between people’s news media knowledge and the ways in which they use social media for news using online survey data in five countries: the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Spain and Sweden ( N = 10,595). We find that people with higher news media knowledge are more likely to include social media in their news repertoire – but not as their main or only source of news. Second, we find that news media knowledge is positively associated with paying attention to source and editorial cues. When it comes to different social endorsement cues, news media knowledge is positively associated with paying attention to the person who shared the news, but negatively associated with paying attention to the number of likes, comments and shares.
This study sought to examine the potential role of news avoidance in belief in COVID-19 misinformation. Using two-wave panel survey data in Singapore, we found that information overload is associated with news fatigue as well as with difficulty in analyzing information. News fatigue and analysis paralysis also subsequently led to news avoidance, which increased belief in COVID-19 misinformation. However, this link is present only among those who are frequently exposed to misinformation about COVID-19.
Previous studies have primarily focused on the detection of fake news using artificial intelligence or identifying it through analysis of politically charged topics and their implications. However, studies have rarely systematically analyzed the characteristics of fake news from the perspective of readers. Little empirical evidence exists demonstrating the positive role of the new media literacy (NML) in assisting adolescents in recognizing fake news. This study examined the relationship among Taiwanese students' level of NML and their performance and perception of the importance of using news trustworthiness (NT) attributes to discern fake news while interacting with media. The cross-sectional study was conducted through a questionnaire survey, and 563 responses were included in the analysis. Importance-performance analysis (IPA) and canonical correlation analysis techniques were used to validate the multidimensional relationships between NML and NT. From the IPA with data-centered quadrants and diagonal-based schemes, 31 of the 32 NT attributes were self-evaluated with lower performance than importance. Canonical correlation analysis showed just a slight correlation between NML and NT. This study seeks to provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of students’ NML and NT skills, and its findings may help to further equip digital readers with the skillset needed to discern facts from falsehoods.
Social media influencers promote not only products and brands but also their opinions on serious topics like party politics or climate change. These so-called digital opinion leaders may exert a powerful impact on their followers’ political attitudes. Accordingly, we explore new directions to explain how influencers’ communication is related to political outcomes by proposing the concept of perceived simplification of politics (PSP). We argue that PSP may fuel political cynicism but also stimulate youth's interest in politics. We also explore important boundary conditions of these associations. We use data from three studies, a two-wave panel survey of adolescents ( N T2 = 294), a cross-sectional survey of young adults ( N = 632), and a two-wave panel survey of young adults ( N T2 = 496) in Germany between 2019 and 2020. Findings of all three studies show that the frequency of exposure to social media influencers’ content increases PSP. In Studies 1 and 2, PSP is related to higher political cynicism, while in Study 3, this relationship is restricted to influencers’ communication about environmental topics and gender equality. Furthermore, Studies 2 and 3 suggest that PSP also increases political interest—yet this association requires a certain level of parasocial interaction (PSI) with the influencer and is contingent on specific political topics.
Empirical research on the relationship between political trust and political participation has rarely focused on adolescents. By acknowledging the important role of young people for the sustainability of representative democracies, this study considers a two-dimensional conceptualization of political trust—that is, distinguishing between trust in order institutions (e.g., the police) and trust in representative institutions (e.g., the parliament)—to examine how it relates to several intended acts of legal and illegal political participation among Flemish eight-grade adolescents. Using structural equation modelling on data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016 ( n = 2,829), we find that Flemish adolescents with lower levels of trust in representative institutions are more likely to withdraw from political life as adults. Those with lower levels of trust in order institutions, however, have a stronger inclination to use a range of political participation modes, including illegal means.
In today’s high-choice media environment, some scholars are concerned that people selectively consume media content based on personal interests and avoid others, which might lead to audience fragmentation across different content genres. Individually, there might be trade-offs between those genres, especially entertainment versus news. This study analyzed a large user engagement dataset (~40,000 users’ comments) collected from the Chinese information application Toutiao, one of the most popular information distribution platforms in China. The results showed that (1) the commenters were not fragmented between content genres, and (2) the users’ news engagement was positively associated with their entertainment engagement. The findings indicate that the availability of high media choices will not reduce the news engagement of those who have strong interest in entertainment. Instead, news engagement might increase alongside the augmentation of the sum of information engagement. Finally, we discussed the differences between relative news engagement and absolute news engagement.
In today's hybrid media environment new content creators challenge the status of professionally produced journalism and blur the lines between professional and non-professional content. Growing up in this information landscape, younger generations have developed news-related practices and attitudes that lie in stark contrast to those of previous generations. In addition, discrepancies exist between news definitions and the use practices of young people. We conducted focus groups with German adolescents (15–17 years), young adults (18–24 years) and adults (40–53 years) in August 2020 to uncover young peoples’ orientation toward news and journalism. Our study indicates that the boundaries of what journalism is and what it is not are becoming increasingly indistinct. However, distinctions do emerge between the journalistic and non-journalistic sources that adolescents and young adults use and the functions they associate with them according to their information needs. Differences between the age groups become apparent in their motivations to stay informed which highlights the important role non-journalistic sources play in information behaviour and opinion formation. For teenage participants especially, Social Media Influencers (SMIs) are relevant within these processes, which are linked to a perceived social duty-to-keep-informed. Moreover, findings from the focus groups highlight cohort-specific differences regarding the understanding of journalism and, consequently, differences in the assessment of trust and reliability as well as the verification strategies that are applied. In sum, for young participants journalism is a reliable source of information, especially in the case of current events and for crosschecking online information, while non-journalistic sources fulfil social needs.
Despite their apparent digital literacy, adolescents often have trouble assessing the accuracy and trustworthiness of the information they encounter. Given the proliferation of fake news and that adolescents are new (or soon-to-be) voters, important issues arise for democratic processes. This study is the first to investigate Romanian adolescents’ self-perceived ability to evaluate the credibility of the news in their media diet. Drawing on a national survey (N = 1,221) of 12th-grade Romanian students (aged 17–18), we found a significant third-person effect in young people’s self-reported ability to detect fake news. This effect is stronger when people compare themselves to distant others than close others. We also found that the most important predictors of this third-person effect are gender, openness to multiculturalism, and lifelong learning, with family education and confirmation bias being non-significant predictors.
This study investigates the predictors of adolescents’ political cynicism in the social media environment. Given that social media are one of the main sources of information for many young people today, it is crucial to investigate how and in which ways social media use is associated with political cynicism. To that aim, we use data from computer-assisted personal interviews of N = 1,061 adolescents between 14 and 19 years in Germany. Our findings reveal that relative information-oriented social media use is related to lower political cynicism, while exposure to extremist political content on social media predicts higher levels of political cynicism. Furthermore, although self-perceived online media literacy is negatively associated with political cynicism, it does not moderate the relationship between political cynicism and relative information-oriented social media use or exposure to extremist content. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of these findings.
At what ages are young people most open to political influence? We test the “formative years” model that underscores the importance of childhood experiences for political development against the “impressionable years” model that asserts the primacy of lessons learned during adolescence. To assess the relative merits of these competing models, we develop a new analytical strategy: the Retrospective Family Context approach. We estimate the political engagement levels of 18-year-olds as a function of annual measures of their parents’ political engagement levels over the course of the prior decade. German household panel data analysis shows that parental cues sink in quite effectively during late childhood, ages 9 to 11, and during the late teens. These results illuminate an essential dimension of political development, and they can inform efforts to encourage young people’s political participation.