Youth Political Engagement on Social Media in the Age of Trump

I’ve missed another session due to AoIR business, but I’m back for the last paper session at AoIR 2018. We start with Joel Penney, whose focus is on the use of social media by young people in the Trump era. He suggests that young people had moved from dutiful to actualising forms of citizenship, where political engagement is no longer just a duty to the state but aims to realise a better form of politics. Such engagement is also playful and creative, including in more partisan contexts.

Joel pursued these ideas through a focus group-based study of 18 politically engaged youth in the United States. How do they perceive their political practices to be changing in the context of the early years of the Trump presidency? The participants were selected by having posted at least once on social media about Donald Trump; they skewed strongly anti-Trump, but some neutral and pro-Trump youth also engaged.

Many of the anti-Trump participants felt a need to respond to Trump’s ideological extremism, especially in order to protect the minorities typically attacked by the President. As Trump himself is highly active on Twitter, these youth felt an urgent need to respond to these messages through social media as well. This is important especially because minority voices have already been silenced for so long, and a re-silencing as a result of oppressive policies seemed like a real possibility.

In this sense, participants again also felt a duty to make their anti-Trump voices heard – but this is no duty to the state itself, but rather a duty to their own side of politics. Pro-Trump participants, by contrast, felt empowered by Trump’s social media use: they felt that they were able to reject political correctness and say things that they knew would offend others; they saw that doing so had not prevented Trump himself from becoming President, after all.

Social news sharing activities by U.S. youth have been especially affected by the outcomes of the U.S. election; some of them are now a great deal more careful about the quality of the news stories they are sharing, and more sensitive to the possibility of ‘fake news’ being shared. They are now looking for corroboration of a story by multiple sources before they share a news item through their own accounts.

But there is also still some playful activity here; some of the participants reported trolling Trump on Twitter by responding to his tweets with anti-Trump memes and similar responses. This is personally gratifying and gives participants a sense of personal agency; some are actively trying to get blocked by the President’s Twitter account, as a marker of personal achievement.

These observations suggest the development of emerging youth citizenship norms that see engagement as a partisan civic duty; the two sides are variously seeing themselves as fighting misinformation or fighting political correctness. Both feel a sense of duty to enter the partisan battles that had previously been associated with a more adult world, and in this way also define their own political identities. In this sense social media are both manifest and latent political actualisation.