Young women are using social media to redefine what political citizenship looks like in a digital age.
Young people’s political activism is undergoing a fundamental transformation that challenges conventional frameworks of civic engagement, as we argue in our recent book, Not Your Parents’ Politics: Understanding Young People’s Political Expression on Social Media. While traditional political analysis might dismiss social media expression as peripheral to “real” politics, our research reveals how digital platforms have become central spaces for political voice—particularly for demographics historically marginalized in institutional political spaces, like young women.
The #BirthdayForBreonna campaign, one of the central case studies in our book, exemplifies this shift. When Cate Young launched the #BirthdayForBreonna campaign in June 2020, she didn’t follow the traditional activist playbook. Instead, she leveraged Instagram’s vernacular of celebration and aesthetics, transforming birthday cards and cake photos into vehicles for political demands. The campaign exemplifies how a new generation is reconstructing political expression through social media’s specific grammars and logics.
As we argue in the book, we are witnessing what we call “expressive citizenship”—a model where publicly voicing views around current events becomes a central form of political participation, particularly in times of turmoil.
This model of expressive citizenship takes on particular significance for young women, who have historically faced barriers to traditional forms of political participation. When they deploy Instagram’s affordances to circulate “activism guides” or use TikTok’s creative features for political commentary, they’re not simply finding alternative outlets for political voice—they’re reconstructing what it means to be a political citizen.
Significantly, social media enables young women to articulate the personal implications of political issues through their preferred modes of expression. Our research reveals how transgender youth leverage these platforms to contest anti-trans legislation, how immigrant girls respond to xenophobic rhetoric through creative video formats and how climate activists construct collective narratives around environmental anxiety. While feminist theory has long asserted the political significance of personal experience, social media provides new infrastructures for circulating these connections and building political consciousness.
This emerging landscape of digital activism also presents distinct challenges. The same platforms that enable creative political expression can constrain it through their commercial logics and algorithmic biases. For instance, our research on the Breonna Taylor campaign revealed how Instagram’s aesthetic norms shaped the representation of its subject, privileging visually appealing, feminized imagery over structural critique. These platforms’ emphasis on marketability and engagement metrics create new tensions between visibility and substantive political discourse.
The legitimacy of young women’s digital political expression faces persistent challenges. Their use of platform-specific conventions—from selfies to aesthetic choices like pink color palettes—often serve as grounds for dismissal, despite the strategic sophistication underlying these choices. The accusation of “performative activism” disproportionately targets young women’s political expression, revealing lingering biases about what constitutes “serious” political engagement.
Yet despite these constraints, young women are the avant-garde of political expression online, developing expressive forms of political communication that collapse traditional distinctions between personal and political, aesthetic and substantive, emotional and analytical. Their approaches suggest new possibilities for political discourse that acknowledges rather than suppresses the role of affect, identity and visual rhetoric in political mobilization.
This transformation in young women’s political expression comes at a critical moment for gender representation in American politics. Kamala Harris’ loss in the recent election is a painful reminder of the persistent barriers facing women in traditional political spaces, and the next four years will make the emergence of alternative channels for political voice all the more significant. While the highest glass ceiling in U.S. electoral politics remains intact, young women are building political communities and shaping political discourse through platform-specific practices that often fly under the radar of conventional political analysis. Their sophisticated navigation of platform affordances isn’t just about finding creative ways to be heard—it’s about redefining what political citizenship looks like in a digital age.
This piece draws from research presented in the authors’ new book, Not Your Parents’ Politics: Understanding Young People’s Political Expression on Social Media (Oxford University Press, 2024).
