How to approach the relationship between politics, social media and young people?
How do TikTok and other social media platforms affect and remake democracy in the post-digital era? How does short video format impact political and cultural expressions in young people’s lives? In April we organized a panel discussion at Tampere University to ponder these themes together.
Author: Heta Mulari
In our current post-digital era (Haslop & Ringrose, 2025), social media platforms are frequently debated in relation to topics such as election propaganda, mis- and disinformation, and algorithmic power. Further, during recent months we have witnessed several heated debates regarding young people’s social media bans and age restrictions. Importantly, youth researchers have pointed to the need to foreground young people’s own perspectives (see, for example, Nuorisotutkijoiden politiikkasuositukset 2026) regarding the benefits and downsides of social media. Young people’s knowledge is often either lacking or downgraded in public debate.
Affective politics in platform societies
As Jose van Dijck and his colleagues (2018) have argued, we currently live in a platform society, which means the wide significance of political-commercial platforms, leading to drastic changes in social life, economics, politics, and culture. By platform society, van Dijck et al. mean the close relation between platforms and societal structures: platforms actively affect sociality and produce the social structures we live in.
Living in a platform society means that also political debates are channeled through social media platforms and influenced by the affordances, such as the algorithms, which are programmed and designed by major social media enterprises with political and commercial interests. According to Sitra’s recent study, algorithms have the potential to steer political debate through foregrounding sensational and polarized content and, thus, affect the democratic processes. One of the key findings of Sitra’s study was that the algorithms are programmed to favor right wing political content over left wing content, regardless of the user’s wishes or preferences.
Besides these biases, the algorithms are programmed to prefer expressions of negative emotions (Fine & Hunt, 2021): thus, content that is affectively sticky with negative emotions gets more visibility and has bigger potential of becoming viral, exemplified by rage bait -content. Thus, it is increasingly important to critically understand how platform affordances impact the political debates on social media – and at the same time, foreground young people’s critical media literacies without reducing their agency to uncritical or unaware recipients. Furthermore, more research is needed regarding how young people use the platforms themselves to both express political expressions and to teach and disturb the algorithms.
Short video formats and young people’s critical media literacies
Another theme we addressed in the panel discussion was short video as a format of producing and conveying knowledge, frequently used by journalists, politicians, and other content creators. TikTok is currently 13-18-year-old young people’s most important platform for accessing news content in Finland, and short video their favourite way of consuming news (Nuoret ja uutismediasuhde, 2024; Sihvonen et al., 2025).
We agreed in the discussion that developing critical understanding of short video formats requires acknowledging their diversity in terms of styles, genres, and narratives. Humouristic, informative, or everyday narratives (just to name a few) use different kinds of audiovisual strategies to engage audiences. For example, one of our panelists, Vilma Rimpelä from RAREMedia, has been developing different ways to implement the short video into diverse formats of engaging informative communication.
As discussed in our panel, young people have considerable knowledge literacy regarding the diverse audiovisual styles of short videos (see also Mulari et al. 2026). This knowledge should be appreciated and acknowledged, in, for example, developing methods in conversational media education regarding mis- and disinformation, and deepfakes (Belova et al., 2022; Haslop & Ringrose, 2025).
Post-digital society, where digital and non-digital spaces are constantly intertwined, requires developing post-digital research methods, which are also applied together with the research participants. These kinds of collaborative, multi-method approaches may help to create more comprehensive understandings of how short video formats and social media sociality are intertwined into politics and everyday life.
The panel discussion was organized in collaboration with TikTokCracy research project, Democracy Research Network, and Perla: Centre for Childhood, Youth and Family Research. The panelists were Lauri Lahikainen (chair), Heta Mulari, Esko Nieminen and Vilma Rimpelä.
References
Belova, N., Krause, M., & Siemens, C. (2022). Students’ strategies when dealing with science-based information in social media: A group discussion study. Education Sciences, 12(9), 603. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12090603
Fine, J. A., & Hunt, M. F. (2021). Negativity and Elite Message Diffusion on Social Media. Political Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09740-8;
Haslop, C., & Ringrose, J. (2025). Post-Tate, post-truth, post-digital: researching and mitigating the misogyny influencers. Gender and Education, 1–17. https://doi-org.libproxy.tuni.fi/10.1080/09540253.2025.2568408
Mulari, H., Hakala, V., Laajasalo, T., Mielityinen, L. & Ellonen, N. (forthcoming, 2026). “You Can Reach So Many Young People There, Because I Think All Young People Use TikTok”: Young People’s Views on Science Communication About Adverse Childhood Experiences. Journal of Science Communication.
Nuoret ja uutismediasuhde 2024. [Young people and their relationship to news media] Uutismedian liitto & Kantar Media Oy.
83 nuorisotutkijaa: Sosiaalista mediaa ei pidä kieltää nuorilta: Nuorisotutkijoiden politiikkasuositukset 2026. https://nuorisotutkimus.fi/83-nuorisotutkijaa-sosiaalista-mediaa-ei-pida-kieltaa-nuorilta/
Sihvonen, T., Pelevina, N., Manninen, V., Waaramaa, T., Salojärvi, V., & Kääntä, L. (2025). “Mitä oot mieltä tästä?”: Ylen journalistiset sisällöt videojakoalusta Tiktokissa. [”What do you think about this?”: Yle’s journalistic content in the video platform TikTok] Lähikuva – audiovisuaalisen kulttuurin tieteellinen julkaisu, 38(1), 26–51. https://doi.org/10.23994/lk.160193
Southerton, C., & McLean, J. (2025). ‘I feel like I get something else to think about’: How do Australian young people see their relationship with TikTok? Children’s Geographies, 23(5), 580–593.
Van Dijck J, Poell T, De Waal M (2018) The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.