A teenage boy in a Brazilian favela circulates a selfie on social media that highlights drug-related violence in his community.1 Catalyzed by the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, at least 2,800 public protests to date have demanded attention to police brutality against African Americans.2 A trans teen learns a new, liberating vocabulary to articulate their identity and finds emotional support through online interactions with ‘strangers’ — precisely those whom young people are instructed to avoid online.3 Organized over social media, hundreds of thousands of young people around the world take to the street in a synchronized ‘climate strike’ to demand government action on climate change.4 Digital civic engagement by youth can look like any of the above; it can include digital instances of more conventional hallmarks of civic engagement, such as reading and circulating news, writing emails to an elected representative or community organization (or interacting with them on social media), or belonging to a campus or community group online. Yet, growing up with low-barrier-to-entry digital media creation and editing tools, many of today’s youth also take to digital venues to develop their civic identities and express political stances in creative ways, such as with videos, memes and artwork5 to claim agency that may not be afforded to them in traditional civic spaces and reimagine the concept of ‘the political’ writ large.
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