In mid-June of 2020, a viral video trend surfaced on TikTok: teens and young adults doing the Macarena in front of screenshots of ticket confirmations to a Trump campaign rally. “I just registered for Trump’s rally, and I’m so excited—to not go,” one TikToker declared. Another posted, “Oh no, I signed up for a Trump rally, and I can’t go.” The grand prank sought to mobilize a mass audience to register for tickets to the rally with no intention of attending, leaving Trump to speak to a largely empty auditorium. In the end, while Trump’s campaign manager declared that one million tickets were requested on their website, Tulsa city officials reported that fewer than 6,200 people attended the event in a stadium that seats 19,000.1 Notably, the TikTok prank was organized and carried out by a perhaps unexpected group: young K-pop (Korean popular music) fans and others whose content comprises “Alt-TikTok.” (Alt-TikTok is used colloquially to refer to pockets of the app where alternative content circulates: this is not where verified TikTok stars like Charlie D’Amelio are dancing.)
Whether or not you consider the TikTok Tulsa caper a political win, the story points to the savvy and creative ways teens leverage social media to participate in and even lead civic actions.2 It stands as a signature example of how popular culture, social media, and politics can collide in unexpected ways, highlighting how online communities—even those like K-pop that are not explicitly civic—have power that lies in wait to be tapped via the right (or wrong) digital invitation, meme, or trend. In this chapter, we use the term “civic” in a broad sense to reference any issues that are relevant to public life. We see civic actions as inclusive of political participation (e.g., voting) as well as efforts to discuss, raise awareness about, protest, and propose solutions to community concerns and societal issues.3
While some might dispute the idea that the TikTok prank constitutes civic engagement at all, it points to a kind of participatory practice that warrants attention. A decade of research on digital life highlights new potentials for youth civic agency but also new puzzles. Our own studies on this topic have surfaced an array of digital civic opportunities that youth acknowledge to be meaningful, powerful, and vexed.
Consider another way electoral politics and polarization unfold in teens’ online worlds—through online polls. Quizzes and polls are a common feature of social media life, often used for entertainment (“Which Games of Thrones character are you?”) and feedback (“Which dress should I wear to the prom?”) Polls are also used by teens to take a pulse of their peers’ attitudes, including views on political candidates. In the fall of 2020, polls asking “Who are you voting for (or supporting): Trump or Biden?” circulated on Instagram and Snapchat and teens and young adults collected votes from their audiences.
The way individual followers vote in an Instagram poll is generally viewable only to the person who created the poll. Poll results are typically revealed to others as a high-level summary with votes and comments anonymized. For example: results from a “Nicki Minaj or Cardi B?” poll would be displayed in aggregate, as something like “Nicki: 65 and Cardi: 35,” perhaps with added commentary like “Nicki slays!” But data from polls can sometimes have a second, more public life.
In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, sixteen-year-old Ruby saw videos popping up on TikTok that used poll data from Instagram to expose people who supported a certain candidate. For example, after teens created and posted polls asking questions like “Biden or Trump?,” they used the data to create video mashups. The mashup videos would begin, “Here are the people who support Y,” followed by strategically curated, rapid-fire photo compilations of candidate Y supporters. The strategy was typically something like this: screenshot and use only unflattering pictures of candidate Y’s supporters, and only flattering pictures of X’s supporters. The resulting compilation made teens’ stances public with a clear message that those who support the creator’s preferred candidate are superior and attractive, and those who support the other candidate are comparatively ugly or uncool—or both.
Ruby shared the strong majority view in her community, so it wasn’t that she feared her personal candidate preference would evoke backlash if made public through a mashup. Rather, the weaponization of social media in this way—and its contribution to what felt like growing polarization among her peers—made her uneasy.
This story is another example of how social media is a dynamic and contested space for youth engagement, including with electoral politics. It also begins to surface tensions that today’s teens give voice to as they navigate contexts where the personal and political are increasingly, often painfully, intertwined.
The powers to copy, paste, remix, and spread content across platforms and audiences are now well-recognized.4 Yet these affordances intersect with new social expectations linked to current civic realities. At the time of this writing, a global pandemic has gripped and, in many respects, paralyzed the world. In the U.S. context, we see heightened attention to racism and racial injustice. In January 2021, we also bore witness to a volatile presidential election and the storming of the U.S. Capitol building by insurrectionists. Then, in August of the same year, the world watched the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. These realities played out with social media as indispensable venues for documentation, mobilization, and collective processing.
The big idea that social media are civic and political spaces isn’t really contested at this point, especially as a recent U.S. president used Twitter as his main communication channel. What is contested is how these channels contribute to civic life and their impact.
In the late 2000s, the term “slacktivism” (or slacker activism) came into parlance.5 In 2009, writer Evgeny Morozov described it as “an apt term to describe feel-good online activism that has zero political or social impact. It gives those who participate . . . an illusion of having a meaningful impact on the world without demanding anything more than joining a Facebook group.”6 In a subsequent New Yorker article in 2010, Malcolm Gladwell proclaimed that “the revolution will not be tweeted,” casting social media posts as lightweight and inconsequential, especially compared to high-burden and high-risk forms of protest of the past. (The 1960s lunch counter sit-ins protesting racial segregation in the South were Gladwell’s case in point).7
As researchers (including us) took up studies of online civics in earnest, it became clear that the story is much more complicated. First, political context is hugely important. As Zeynep Tufekci’s research on networked protest in Egypt and Turkey shows, in repressive countries, tweeting can be “very brave” given the dangers of public political expression.8 More generally, the role of the Internet in sharing information and mobilizing actions (even “thin” actions9 like reposting information) is hard to dispute. An obvious example is use of e-petitions to mobilize mass support for civic causes ranging from “Stand with Law Enforcement” to “Stand with Our Teachers.”10 Even Morozov acknowledged that social media campaigns can raise awareness and, in some cases, considerable funds that can be deployed toward impact.11
The distinction between “voice” and “influence” offers a helpful, even if not precise parsing of recurring questions about online activism.12 Indeed, influence or concrete impact often requires more than a compelling viral video, whether it be a poignant narrative about growing up in a racist world or a more explicit call to action to protect or limit gun rights. Specifically, achieving impact requires identifying the right levers (whether they be law or policy shifts or changes in social attitudes), sorting out how to apply strategic pressure, and mobilizing others to participate.
Yet, voice does matter—and in ways that go beyond the vital and empowering effects for individuals of “having a voice.” In their book #HashtagActivism (2020), Jackson, Bailey, and Foucault Welles document the significance of social media—especially Twitter—for historically marginalized groups’ efforts to build powerful “counterpublics.” Key to this is the hashtag (#), an important platform feature that allows users to tap into broader audiences and contribute to “a larger collective storytelling.”13 While there is much work to be done to address racial profiling, identity-based discrimination, and sexual violence, hashtag activism has brought important voices and stories “from the margins” to the center. Even as racism and sexism persist in various forms, the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements drove visible shifts in public discourse if not some policies.14
Early critics cast online civic posts as “clicktivism”: thin and “easy” moves that merely give the poster a sense of self-satisfaction that they’re doing something. But it’s always been more complicated than it seems.
One need not look far to find inspiring examples of how young people leverage digital tools for voice and influence. You may think of Greta Thunberg: the teen climate change activist named TIME magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year and who, at the time of this writing, has five million-plus Twitter followers. But Thunberg has plenty of company from smaller players who are engineering big impacts. Examples of digital activism aimed at protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) offer an illustrative case (see the “‘Give the Animals and People a Voice!!!’” box).
Such examples of youth digital activism are captured by the term “participatory politics.” These are “interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern.”16 Digital media lower barriers to the public sphere, offering interactive and creative entry points for participation. Informal avenues for changemaking are especially relevant to youth who are not yet of voting age and whose voices may be sidelined in institutional politics and policymaking.17
Naming the particulars is important. Specific participatory practices include opportunities for civic inquiry, voice, dialogue about public issues, and mobilization of audiences to act on a given cause.18 These practices are longstanding components of civic action to which digital technologies lend new powers. Opportunities for voice are especially notable in a context where youth can express themselves in authentic ways, producing and circulating meaningful content in formats ranging from punchy tweets to pointed memes and infographics.19
But the opportunities for civic voice are far more complicated than most adults realize and are relevant in everyday life, not just in extraordinary cases. This is the message we heard from today’s teens again and again: the current context is riddled with social tensions that make online voice both an unavoidable consideration and unequivocally fraught.
A brief rewind to an earlier state of play sets the stage. In 2011–2012, we set out to understand how civically engaged youth were tapping social media as part of their activism. We interviewed seventy young people (ages fifteen to twenty-five) who had varied civic interests and political views. We met teens like Gavin and Chen, both sixteen at the time. Gavin was involved in Organizing for America and a suite of other youth democracy initiatives. She also cohosted a cable TV show about politics. Chen was serving on a local politician’s youth advisory council and active on the jobs committee. How, we wondered, did young people like Gavin and Chen who already had strong civic commitments navigate social media?
We coined the terminology of “blended,” “bounded,” and “differentiated” to capture what we found. Most used social media to share their views and signal commitment to their chosen causes. Blended described young people like Gavin, whose civic lives were an integrated feature of their online identities. Chen and others instead bounded their civic and political views, keeping them entirely offline—in effect, setting boundaries around this aspect of their identities. A third group adopted differentiated strategies that varied by platform. They might be unabashedly political on Twitter, but never on Facebook.
Young people weighed a variety of considerations as they decided how much, and where, to be civic online. Some of them were involved in civic organizations that required them to post as part of their organizational roles or instead prohibited from expressing anything potentially political online. Audience and reputational concerns played a role, too, as they considered such questions as: “How will my followers react if I post about this particular issue?” “Will I be praised, attacked, or just muted for trying to advance an agenda?” Some reasoned that social media is a powerful PR tool for civic action; others worried that their posts would be seen as self-promoting.
Overall, our most striking finding was that even those with deep civic involvements adopted quite different approaches when it came to social media.20 Youth made this clear: blending was an option, and so too was bounding. Most young people chose to raise their civic voices online. Some did so unreservedly, while others limited their political posts to controlled audiences on specific apps. Still others remained silent on civic matters on social media despite their unambiguous civic commitments offline in school-based or community organizations.
When we followed up with the same people a few years later (specifically, in 2013), all were past high school, and some were well into the early years of their careers. Notably, their online civic expression had become quieter overall. Concerns about both online toxicity and leaving behind a politicized digital footprint were key drivers in what we referred to as a “hush falling over the crowd.”21 Other studies found similar dynamics, adding to a growing perception of social media as a “risky” space for political talk.22 Choosing not to speak up seemed to offer a safer course.
Fast forward to 2020–2021. Our original interviewees are now well into adulthood, but our research has continued, and other teens have stepped up as our tour guides through the landscape of digital civic expression. We can see what’s endured, including anxiety about navigating a networked public sphere that is starkly polarized and often toxic. Scalability (the capacity to reach potentially large audiences via social media content) remains a game changer for civic agendas. The opportunities to share information and learn about issues are ever-present. And reckoning with the “digital afterlife” of online expression, civic and otherwise, is still a noted concern.23
Yet there is also something new: a widely felt set of social expectations means that being quiet online is difficult. The age-old expression “between a rock and a hard place” has a particular resonance as we listen to today’s teens. There’s a consensus among them that civic and political life has a clear, unavoidable digital dimension. And at once, digital life has an unavoidable civic dimension. Even teens who aren’t civically active feel subtle and not so subtle pressures to take a public stand on current issues. What, when, and where they post—and, importantly, don’t post—are all charged.
Teens feel pressured to signal awareness and support for timely issues on social media and even evidence that they’re taking action on some level. The particulars of their experiences are unequivocally shaped by their identities, contexts, and the civic topic at hand. Yet the notion that social media creates pressure, and a sense that there are countless ways to “get it wrong,” has broad resonance.
Case in point: Black Lives Matter.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement intensified discussions of race and racism across the United States. Though the movement began years earlier, the 2020 murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other unarmed Black Americans refocused attention to the long history of racial injustice and reenergized calls to action. This cultural and political moment is significant in its own right; it also provides an illuminating window into current complexities behind teens’ screens. Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook all offered crucial spaces for learning, voice, dialogue, mobilization, and coordination of actions ranging from fundraising to in-person protests. And teens from all racial backgrounds were active participants: liking, posting, or reposting expressions of outrage and impassioned calls to action often punctuated with strategic hashtags (for those supporting the movement, such hashtags included #BlackLivesMatter, #ICantBreathe, and #DefundThePolice). But behind these digital acts, big and small, teens grappled with a range of worries from the civic to the personal and social.
Being vocal on social media is a pressure felt across the board, but teens of color face particular burdens. Allahna, a high school senior who is a leader in her school’s Black Student Union and identifies as Black/Haitian, recounts being caught up in the work of organizing protests and programming for her school. As a leader, she felt an implicit but distinct pressure to post on social media too, which frustrated her because many of the BLM social media posts that flooded her Instagram feed from her peers felt less than helpful and, in some cases, wholly disingenuous. She didn’t really want to post, but others seemed to expect it.
Ashlyn is a Sri Lankan American teen with a keen interest in understanding the psychological roots of social injustice. Over the past year, Ashlyn developed a palpable sense that she needed to be “woke” to every injustice and post about every issue. This caused personal stress; plus, she wondered about the potential civic impact: “I felt a pressure to post and use my platform like big or small to spread awareness about these issues. But later on, I felt like it was just not impactful.” It also took a toll: “[It started] impacting my mental health . . . it just felt like too much pressure.” In a world where information is so easily accessible, teens repeatedly voice a sense that knowing everything about everything (and having an opinion on it) feels expected.
Oshun, who identifies as Ghanaian, is a natural leader and the eldest of nine in her family. She found that her Black peers were quite explicit about the obligation to post. “Their little comments, their little captions would be like, ‘If you don’t post, you really aren’t a Black person.’” For Oshun, this pressure was productive and “for a good cause, like the things that they pressure you to post are things that matter . . . life and death situations.” And yet, she weighed a range of risks and considerations, amplified by the context of her largely White community. She explains, “People in oppressed groups, people of color, in a White area, often think: ‘Am I ready to post this?’ knowing that I might get some backlash.”
Oshun navigates a distinct sense of stress when she posts about BLM. She grapples with questions like: “Are my friends gonna be offended by this? Am I comfortable losing those friendships about this? Am I comfortable being the person who speaks out for everybody else on this? . . . It will get to the teachers because someone will take a screenshot and send it to a teacher. The principal may talk to you about it. Am I ready for all that to come down for one post about Black Lives Matter?”
Beyond the interpersonal risks, Oshun fears potential consequences that spill over to her school life and to adults in positions of authority. This worry has an even higher-stakes corollary in how youth of color are often subject to racialized digital surveillance by law enforcement officers who can now imperceptibly monitor teens’ posts for possible signals about criminal activity. Officers can make judgments about whose social media activity warrants their monitoring.24 The ways in which social media posts are subject to “policing” by both peers and adults clarify the stakes of online participation.
Oshun wanted to post—and ultimately, she did again and again because of her core commitment to the movement. Still, she had to calculate the risks. Other teens, like Allahna and Ashlyn, felt a shared and deeply personal commitment. Still, they would have preferred to stay quiet online but felt pressured to post.
White teens also experience pressures to signal that they care about and are acting on racial justice issues. And their White racial identities matter in how they proceed. Some prioritize civic impact and a sense of responsibility to speak out. As Maeve shared, “I think if you have a platform, then it’s really important for you to use it, especially if you’re someone with privilege. I have a very small platform but as a White person, I think it’s important to speak out [against racism].” Other White teens struggled to find their footing, posting with a keen sensitivity to the risks of misstepping and being called out for it. Ruth Joy explained, “It’s almost like people are just ready to jump down your throat and tell you you’re doing it wrong any way you do it. And it makes it hard to be like a good ally and be supportive and know what to do sometimes.” Still others grappled less with the civic import of issues at hand and more with the immediate repercussions of posting and of not posting. As Jack put it, “I think it goes both ways, you know, feeling scared to post something or feeling obligated to post something.”
Winter (who identifies racially as Black and from a Latinx/Hispanic background) shared, “I think if teens don’t post, especially if you’re White, it’s a red flag because why wouldn’t someone want to support people getting justice?” In 1967, long before social media posting was a consideration, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.” Adults may consider social media a distinct domain, optional and “extra credit” as a context for speaking up, at least as compared to in-person activism. A decade ago this may have been the case. But no such distinction exists for today’s teens. Social media is a key venue for voice about all things. Silence on pressing issues can indeed feel like a betrayal.
And yet, finding the right balance between showing support but not grabbing the mic, so to speak, is crucial and again vexed. Jade, who is Indian, expressed frustration about posts by White teens that signal support but are ultimately “self-centering” or suggestive of “White saviorism” rather than uplifting the voices of people of color. For all teens, the under-a-spotlight quality of public social media posts and a larger cancel culture adds to the stakes. The proximal, interpersonal threats are especially front of mind.
Based on our earlier studies of youth online activism, I (Emily) published a paper in 2014 titled, “The Personal Is Political on Social Media.” The title played on a well-known saying about how one’s personal life and choices have political significance. This remains true and teens’ experiences in today’s digital public sphere suggest that the inverse is also true: the political is interpersonal on social media.
Friendships have long been recognized as complicating factors in, if not an impediment to, discussion of political issues both in person25 and in digital spaces.26 But current social pressures to speak out about timely civic issues are palpable, putting friendships literally on the line. Teens judge and feel judged by friends and peers for the presence and absence of posts on trending civic topics. The when, what, where, and frequency of posts about civic issues are all under the microscope—and what is said and unsaid can reaffirm, strain, or break friendships.
Earlier, we quoted Oshun who puzzled about her friends’ potential reactions as she crafted her own posts. Nanaa describes how some teens actively monitor their peers’ posts—and what they see, or don’t see, determines friendship status: “I had a lot of friends who are minorities and this summer, they were like, ‘I’m watching . . . which one of my friends are reposting things and . . . if you haven’t said anything about BLM, then you don’t care about me and you’re not my friend.’ . . . people genuinely will break friendships over someone not like using their platform and like posting about it.” While Nanaa doesn’t monitor her friends in these ways, she understands the motivation. Echoing the theme of “silence is taking sides,” she believes that “not picking a side is not an option because that means that you don’t care.”
The dominant beliefs in a teen’s community (liberal, conservative, mixed) determine reception of posts and associated social consequences. Genevieve, a White teen who lives in an ideologically mixed community has publicly “picked a side” and suffered the (interpersonal) consequences. She lost not only thirty-plus followers, but also at least one friend. She explained, “I never really spoke about human rights issues . . . and then when I did, I started to lose followers. . . . I’ve also had my stuff posted on other people’s Private Stories and then they’re saying mean things about me.” She recounted people who responded to tell her they disagreed with her or even to inform her their friendship was over: “I posted something supporting Biden and this girl on my swim team swiped up and she was like, ‘oh, like, I’m not gonna be friends with you anymore’ . . . and I have not talked to her in months because this happened like a while back, and she just hasn’t talked to me.”
Ruby’s story about TikTok posts to expose people’s political beliefs was part of a broader climate of intolerance for peers who weren’t politically liberal; in Genevieve’s case, it was her liberal views that were out of step with her peer group and caused interpersonal issues. Despite the obvious social costs, Genevieve persisted, sustained by the belief that the issues are bigger than her: “I have to post . . . because, like, I feel like things need to be said . . . things need to be shared. . . . Things need to change in the country.”
The same kinds of posts that cost Genevieve friends and followers have a different reception and meaning for teens in less ideologically diverse contexts. This ties into another social fact: posting that is controversial in one context can be performative in another.
For example: Jack’s Instagram followers largely share his views so when he posts, he says, “I’m not expecting any controversy . . . zero pushback.” Graham describes his community and his audience as similarly ideologically homogeneous, which is why he sees political posts as simply “feeding a fed horse.” In these cases, whether online posts will impact the issue they care about is not the material question. At the end of the day, their digital posts are about creating or maintaining a public image as “a good person” with the “right” views in front of a vigilant, like-minded audience.
Strategic curation of teens’ online identities for peers and other audiences is ongoing27 and alertness to one’s civic self-presentation is now an essential component. Among the qualities teens feel pressure to perform is being up on the news and more generally woke. Recall Ashlyn, who expressed how a need to be woke to “all the situations and injustices that are happening” and post accordingly ultimately affected her mental health. Posting is a way for teens to signal awareness and moral goodness. As Jack explained: “You have your political opinion public and everyone’s like, ‘Oh yeah, you’re a good person and you know what you’re talking about.’”
It may be unsurprising, then, that the term “performative activism” is well known to today’s teens as a common allegation and ongoing source of struggle. It goes both ways. Teens interrogate the authenticity of peers’ civic posts while puzzling over how they themselves can be authentic.
Knowing what’s authentic versus performative on social media can be hard to pin down. Teens nonetheless often feel, rightly or not, that they can decipher the authenticity of peers’ posts.
Easy forms of digital activism are quickly labeled as performative, and at times they are. “Tagging chains” are a prime example. Participating in an invitation to “tag six of your friends who also believe in Black Lives Matter” requires minimal effort and shows little evidence of further commitment to a cause. For Jade, these tagging chains both “trivialize the movement” and are ultimately self-centering: “it’s a way to subtly bring attention back to yourself rather than truly to the movement at hand.”
The presence or absence of actionable information in a post can be seen as a further indicator of authentic commitment to an issue versus paying lip service. Teens take notice when posts express outrage about an issue or indicate moral support but don’t include links to news, information about a rally/protest, an e-petition, or a site to collect donations for the cause. As one teen put it: “If you’re not posting to, like, actually help those situations then are you really even doing anything?”
As teens read peers’ posts for signs of performativity, they triangulate with other data, both from their in-person interactions and the person’s posting history. Who continues to post about issues? Who shows up to post when a topic is hot but then exits once the moment has passed and they “stop caring about looking good”? Lil Ronny says he can tell “who are the people who fake it” versus those who are committed. “Because there’s people who would show up [to the protest], take a couple of pictures, be like, ‘oh yeah everybody pop out’ and then they leave. And then there’s . . . the people who walk at least over two, three miles for a cause and actually go ahead and pursue that change.” Teens take quick notice, too, of misalignment between how some people act in school (“who’s standing up for oppressed groups?”) and what they’re posting online. Other studies of teens’ experiences also suggest sensitivity to “fake wokeness,” meaning posts shared mainly to impress others.28
Attempting to suss out performativity online seems almost reflexive, and it likely has roots in identity development.29 In a pre-Instagram world, Nakkula and Toshalis described the friction between adolescents when peers observe what they see as differences in behavior across contexts: “Why are you like that with them but like this with me? Which is the real you?”30 Social media is yet another context where adolescents are under the watchful eye of peers who take quick note of any potential inconsistencies. And yet, this is a puzzle for teens who are in the very process of developing their own views and civic identities, still learning about new issues and finding their footing as they learn to articulate personal stances.31
In the digital public sphere, it doesn’t seem to take much to create friction. For example, posting about a civic issue if one hasn’t before might be judged by peers as discrepant and inauthentic. What seems inauthentic may indeed be a shallow attempt to avoid social censure. Or, what appears like a random jumping “right on the bandwagon” may instead be first steps in a young person’s trajectory of building a civic identity.
Today’s teens confront two truths: posting can be a must and there are countless ways to get it wrong—being seen as inauthentic or performative is just one way. Again, the particulars vary based on teens’ identities and contexts, yet the sense that both risks and pressures abound is cross-cutting. This tension is heightened by observing, if not directly experiencing, fallout from misposts. Teens name several distinct ways in which they or their peers have stumbled.
Timing (when teens post certain content) is crucial and complicated. Flagrant missteps include posting of frivolous and self-focused content when urgent issues are unfolding. Here, the person who misposts is (or at least appears to be) completely oblivious to events in the wider world. One teen at a large, suburban high school posted a selfie at the beach that would have, on any other day, received just a steady stream of likes and even over the top praise. But the beach selfie was posted just a few days after George Floyd was killed.
The blowback was severe and highly public. The post caused a full-blown “scandal” among students that unfolded largely in the Instagram comment thread where critics of the post clashed with close friends of the teen. A vocal group bashed the post for being disrespectful and simply wrong, while others defended the post and pushed back on critics’ harsh tone and personal attacks. This incident makes visible the undeniable relevance of civic life to teens’ social media lives in general. It also points to shifting norms about when it’s appropriate to post certain content and the role of technological affordances. The timestamp affixed to online posts serves as a visible and persistent record of the misstep. And deleting the post does little to expunge the evidence in a context where screenshotting and reposting is easy and a go-to strategy for accountability.
Even when the content of a social media post is decidedly civic, teens can stumble by posting about the wrong issue at the wrong time. Nanaa shared how this plays out in her networks: “There’s always an argument about like, ‘Oh, why are you focusing on that issue right now? Because this like this [other] one is more pressing, and this is what we all need to be focusing on and putting our resources towards.’ . . . People punish each other when what they’re passionate about isn’t on trend. So activism for issues which might not be as mainstream is much harder to achieve because people feel like they’re not supposed to be speaking about that right now.” Here, Nanaa points to individual and civic costs associated with a world where myriad civic issues compete for attention and—in certain contexts, at certain moments—there are “right” and “wrong” issues to give voice to.
Even when a post hits the marks of being the “right” content at the right moment, dilemmas abound and it’s easy to slip up. Posts can intentionally or unintentionally trivialize movements, can be read as self-indulgent or self-centering, can hint or even strongly suggest White saviorism, and more. And yet, again, being silent on a burning issue is seen as taking sides.
Teens observe, and express varying levels of dismay about, the public shaming and social outcasting of peers who misstep or just hold views that are out of step with their peers. Online bullying and even physical violence like getting “jumped” are cited outcomes for voicing the “wrong” beliefs on social media. As teens contend with a range of pressures and risks, a broader cancel culture looms.
Cancel culture or “call out culture” refers to a dynamic by which individuals are canceled, in effect socially exiled, for stepping out of line in some manner. Whether the infraction is online (an offensive tweet) or “in real life” (a verbal rant toward a neighbor or stranger that gets recorded), digital and social media are central to cancel culture. The same technologies and participatory practices that facilitate broader civic actions are leveraged to call out the perpetrator. Digital evidence is often circulated far and wide. It gets reposted in comment sections on the person’s latest posts. The canceled person’s infractions may even be compiled into videos or detailed on designated accounts.
Public figures, influencers, and celebrities are common targets of cancellation. Their social media blows up as they are shamed for offensive conduct, past or present, along with implicit or explicit calls for others to unfollow or “deplatform” them (i.e., mass unfollowing as a means to cut their audience). Examples abound. In late 2019, popular author J. K. Rowling faced a backlash for tweets identified as transphobic. Harry Potter book sales subsequently dropped precipitously, and some fan fiction sites scrubbed the author’s name from their forum.32
In this way, cancellations can be seen as a “cultural boycott” and a mechanism for holding elites accountable.33 As Zeynep Tufekci argues, a “social-media fury” is sometimes “protesters’ only tool of deterrence against wrongdoing by the powerful.”34 Some teens agree and endorse the idea that cancel culture is a valuable tool or at least “a necessary evil.” It’s “a way we can hold celebrities accountable. . . . There are some social media influencers/celebrities who I think have actually learned and improved . . . without cancel culture they would have continued with their other beliefs.”
Although such cancellations have a clear civic agenda, the phenomenon of cancellation has also drifted toward infractions that may be better characterized as drama. A high-profile example: In the spring of 2019, beauty influencer and “CoverBoy” James Charles was declared canceled by fellow influencer Tati Westbrook after endorsing a rival vitamin product. An online feud ensued that included damning personal attacks and false allegations. In the drama, Charles lost millions of followers, although once the dust settled, his platform recovered.35 This kind of mission creep leaves some teens skeptical. Seventeen-year-old Michelle explained, “Cancel culture started with maybe good intentions of trying to call out people that have done wrong things but [now] it’s, like, confused. It’s diverted from its original purpose. Now there’s like people who are getting canceled for very minor things.”
Whether cancel culture is an effective tool for accountability and justice, a reasonable way to motivate real change, or simply a drama machine is subject to debate. Yet its relevance to digital civic life is not. Although some teens perceive cancel culture as only relevant to influencers and others with massive online platforms, the phenomenon is observed among everyday people, including teens.36 A number of teens in our research recounted attempts to cancel peers for offensive speech in class or online. Some raised questions about the efficacy and value of such efforts: “How does that help in the long term? How does that help them understand?”
Whether teens risk cancellation on a large or small scale, the threat can amplify the stakes of online posts that, as noted, are already pressured as is. More generally, these realities complicate once again the broader claim that online activism is easy.
As we were working on this chapter, we used our typical approach: drawing on our own recent data, past research, and the literature, and then circling back to review our interpretations with teens. One of these conversations—with four teens who were part of our advisory council—grew so heated that when it ended, we called an impromptu, late-night research team meeting to debrief. Perhaps because we knew that the four teens shared similar (liberal) political views, the intensity of the exchanges caught us off guard.
This was the crux of the conflict: is it okay to listen to the other side? As we continued to explore this issue, it proved such a volatile faultline that we started to think of the question as a third rail.
The sense of urgency around certain identity-based civic issues is certainly at play here. Some teens are of the mind that hearing out the other side is risky when human rights and lives are at stake. Maeve put it this way: “It’s hard to have conversations when their side is that you don’t deserve rights. It’s hard to hold a dialogue when the other side is just against you as a person.” Adrian couldn’t bear the thought of it: “Why should I take anything they say into consideration if they don’t consider other people’s lives? If they’re not respecting other people’s lives, then why should I respect what they say?”
Still other teens expressed dismay about a felt climate of intolerance that social media can exacerbate. Diego described a climate at his school whereby “If you don’t agree with us, then you shouldn’t have a voice.” He saw this dynamic reflected online where “a lot of voices are suppressed. . . . I know people who are conservative and don’t post because I think they’re kind of afraid to be shut down and canceled. Personally, I’m someone who’s on the left but I also want to hear from other people’s perspectives and I don’t get to.” Graham echoed this concern: “I just feel like we shouldn’t shut people out just for their beliefs and I feel like my experience on social media has kind of made me shut others out.”
Teens’ polarized perspectives on the acceptability of listening and dialogue play out among adults too. Features of the current political moment (particularly the stakes associated with issues like racial justice) may be relevant to some teens’ reluctance to talk across perspectives. Interestingly, studies show that listening to the other side comes at a cost: it can sap motivation to go to bat for one’s own side.37 From a civic development perspective, dialogue across perspectives and experiences with civic action are both important.38 But they don’t always mix well.
Filter bubbles are created and reinforced by algorithms that personalize digital experiences, including newsfeeds, ads, and recommended content.39 These algorithms can pull teens into insular pockets of the Internet based on budding beliefs and interests. The downsides of being stuck in an echo chamber or pulled into a conspiracy theory are self-evident. Some teens who recognize them try to strategically outsmart, reeducate, or hack the algorithms behind their feeds (searching, for example, for different kinds of content to reshape what they see). These efforts to hack the algorithm have limited success. At the same time, teens acknowledge upsides of echo chambers, including the ways that going deeper into an issue sharpens one’s understanding and stance in a community of like-minded people. For teens like Maeve and Adrian, the echo chambers are almost a source of self-protection since seeing what feels like personal attacks on their feeds seems to erode a sense of well-being. And yet, the algorithm acts as a consequential Harry Potter–esque Sorting Hat, using an invisible logic to send people in different directions that have profound implications for what they see and what they don’t.
The breaking news for us in our latest round of research is that avoiding politics is no longer an option. Listening to teens, we heard a lot about what’s hard: about pressures and challenges, about interpersonal tensions and consequences, about being authentic versus performative, about echo chambers and intolerance.
We also heard the same questions adults often weigh in the current polarized context: How can social media enrich versus undercut civic life? What information can I trust? How much of an echo chamber am I in? Is it ok to listen to the other side and on what issues?
But, make no mistake, we also heard about the positives. These emerge loudest and clearest when we asked teens, “What do you wish adults understood about teens’ civic and political lives on social media?” Here are a few examples that encompass themes we heard repeatedly:
I wish that parents knew that a lot can be learned and good conversations can be had online. (sixteen-year-old)
I am certain that if the internet did not exist, I would not be even close to as informed as I am today, nor would I be as intellectually curious. (seventeen-year-old)
I love having access to social media because it gives me a window into pieces of society, ideas, and people that I wouldn’t otherwise have. (sixteen-year-old)
Adults need to understand our activism holds major significance in our lives. . . . If you choose not to care, you’re living a life of privilege. Adults, in my opinion, should . . . uplift our voices and use their platforms to support the new upcoming generations—virtually and non-virtually. (seventeen-year-old)
But acknowledging the positives is just one step. Also on teens’ wish list for adults to understand: the pressures and complications they face as they explore and express civic issues online.
I wish adults saw the transformation of activism [and] how it has manifested into peer pressure to validate your morality. A lot of parents encourage us to think for ourselves but the social climate does not always allow for that. (seventeen-year-old)
Adults need to understand the underlying pressures teens experience when trying to navigate politics/civic expression on social media. . . . I think adults need to acknowledge that it’s difficult for us to feel informed and knowledgeable about topics when there is so much misinformation out there. They should also understand . . . the fear of posting about controversial topics that could potentially spread hate towards you. There are the pressures of not trying to be performative, but also trying to voice your opinion. I know a lot of people have stepped back due to their fears of being seen as a performative activist. Finally, I just think that adults need to recognize the impacts of this form of social [media] on our mental health and how we sometimes just need to take a break from it all. (fifteen-year-old)
This is their world: digital and civic, powerful yet pressure-filled, rich with information and misinformation. The personal is political on social media. The political is also profoundly interpersonal in today’s networked world.