Contrasting Young People's Personal and Political Uses of Social Media

Recent debates have highlighted the increasingly blurred boundaries between everyday personal social media use to maintain social networks and its use for broader engagement with politics. Young people use social media extensively and many see that active use of social media by political actors will enhance young people’s reconnection with formal politics. In this paper we analyse how young people themselves conceptualise the relationship between their everyday social media use, their use of it for political expression, and how both politicians and celebrities try to engage with them in politics. Most existing studies tend to treat young people’s political engagement as homogenous; instead we analyse young people’s attitudes towards political use of social media by comparing both active participants with non-participants, as well as those from an advantaged social-economic status with less advantaged young people.  This data analysis is based on 12 asynchronous online group discussions participated in by 108 young people in Australia, UK and the USA. In each country the groups were divided into four segments: high/low participation by high/low SES to ensure that the discussion groups themselves had high homophily.