Politics online: 18% of young people in the EU engage in discussions while 10% participate in consultations

Young Europeans view social media networks as natural channels for expressing their ambitions and concerns, and for sharing opinions and participating. According to Eurostat data, 82% of young people are active on social media; half generate and share material and 18% are active posters of political opinions. It is an upward trend that has led researchers from Open Evidence, a UOC spin-off group, to recommend that European institutions and local governments implement a drive towards digital governance, exploiting the potential of ICT to engage young people as key participants in public debate. The study says that public authorities need to adopt a proactive approach to harnessing the power of ICT. They need to aspire to good digital governance, and digital governance implies a paradigm shift, that of empowering citizens. Rather than merely providing services, the idea must be to facilitate public debate and community engagement outside of the institutional structure.

And how can that be successfully achieved? “Firstly, public institutions need to focus on training the professionals who work with young people to use these new spaces as tools for debate and informal education. And secondly, they need to generate spaces for debate and encourage participation from young people relating to issues that affect the community”, says Francisco Lupiáñez, director of Open Evidence and co-author of the “Study on the impact of the internet and social media on youth participation and youth work”, developed by this UOC spin-off group for the European Commission. The study included a literature review, an inventory of fifty good practices, the analysis of a number of case studies deemed to be benchmarks in relation to online youth participation, and interviews conducted with twenty opinion leaders.


Transmedia content and youth empowerment

“Over the last quarter of a century the EU’s youth policies and programmes have focused on youth employment and non-formal education, but now they need to move towards fostering the creation of innovative methods. This goes beyond the funding of programmes”, researcher and co-author Alexandra Theben points out. She adds, regretfully, that “these channels of youth participation are yet to become accepted as legitimate forms of participation”. The study recommends a change of approach in this regard at an institutional level in order to empower young people, as well as the generation of transmedia content based on the target groups. This includes, for example, the creation of Telegram groups for school council representatives, through which initiatives are debated and proposed, with videos generated to publicize on Twitter the decisions approved, followed by the creation of open discussion groups on Facebook Live.


Reducing social exclusion

Digital participation also presents an opportunity to combat social exclusion. “In this case, the divide does not concern access to, but strategic use of ICT”, Lupiáñez explains. Theben goes on to warn that, “the digital native myth may lead to the misconception that young people are all tech-savvy and, therefore, do not need to be considered in policymaking initiatives that target digital inequality”.