Youth Collective Political Expression on Social Media: Communication Within and Across Political Differences

In order to make civic education more relevant to today’s youth and today’s political climate, there is a need to first understand youth political expression in the myriad sites where it is taking place, via the forms most resonant with them. The aim of this project is to conduct an in-depth analysis of youth collective political expression on the social media sites that are particularly popular with young people today, with the aim of identifying implications for political socialization and civic dialogue. Relying on a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, Drs. Literat and Kligler-Vilenchik are examining how youth use the affordances of social media to collectively express political views, and how this differs across political stances, and across social media platforms. This research facilitates a deeper understanding of the emerging forms of political expression embraced by today’s youth, illuminating how social media afford collective political expression for youth, by allowing them to deliberately connect to an assumed like-minded audience with similar beliefs through the use of shared symbolic resources.,