Social Media Platforms and the Shaping of Moroccan Youth Identity: Fostering Gender Equality and Optimizing Media Literacy

Social media platforms offer a free space for youth mobilization, advocacy and participation in political change and accountability. They offer a venue for youth-led movements to voice out their exigencies and urge public support and response. Furthermore, social networking websites enable users to maintain and promote existing cultural values as well as access myriad cultures and develop global ideals’ awareness, appreciation and appropriation (Bansal et al., 2024). Moving around these media resources to advocate for change could trigger an unbalanced perception of identity and self-conception for youth grassroots (Echesony, 2024). Due to paucity of research in this area, this reality calls for the necessity of investigating how media platforms influence youth Moroccan grassroots’ perception and formation of identity with respect to gender equality. The paper also has further intentions of evaluating the participants’ media literacy and awareness in addressing issues pertinent to gender equality in Morocco. Theoretical perspectives and analysis will be carried out drawing on research on globalization, youth identity formation and media. A quantitative approach will be adopted, hence, the population size will be determined by simple random sampling to obtain the intended demographics. Using online surveys, responses will be provided via Google Forms by young Moroccan adults from diverse educational backgrounds after considering ethical issues. To reassure the generalizability of the results, the intended participants will be included from various Moroccan cities. The data will be processed and analysed using both descriptive and inferential statistical analysis for drawing logical conclusions.