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Social media, and especially popular youth-focused platforms like TikTok, can offer a valuable window into youth experiences, including their perceptions of online learning. Building on a large-scale thematic analysis of 1,930 TikTok videos posted in March-June 2020, this study examines how young people shared their experiences of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings indicate that youth portrayed online coursework as overwhelming and relentless against the traumatic background of the pandemic. They sought support, empathy, and authenticity from teachers, and both received and provided emotional and educational support to peers on the platform. Students' home contexts emerged as particularly salient, making visible the intersections between young people's home, school and social lives. By facilitating a grounded, bottom-up understanding of students' experiences and perceptions--shared in their preferred spaces and modes of expression--this research stresses the need to attend to youth perspectives to craft more equitable and empowering educational futures.

The article "Expressive citizenship: Youth, social media, and democracy" explores the concept of expressive citizenship among young people, emphasizing the importance of political expression on social media platforms. The authors argue that young people's political expression is creative, personal, and meaningful, shaping their political views and connecting them with others. The emergence of expressive citizenship as a model of good citizenship highlights the role of social media in political socialization and participation among youth, with implications for future research in the field of children and media studies. The article also discusses the challenges and complexities of expressive citizenship, including issues of performative expression, mobilization, and affective polarization in online political discourse. [Extracted from the article]

With the rise of feminist sentiment and the growing awareness of gender equity in China, social media has become an increasingly central space for Chinese feminist expression. However, the complex dynamics of feminist expression in these online spaces—and the role of popular culture in facilitating such discourse—are still to be fully elucidated. Here, focusing on the understudied social media platform Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), we analyze the online discussion sparked by the stand-up comedy acts of Chinese female comedians. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of Douyin videos and related comments, we demonstrate how users employed the platform's creative features to challenge everyday sexism by echoing or building upon the stand-up comedians' gags. At the same time, the analysis also uncovers how Douyin is used to insult and push back against these feminist voices. Our findings shed light on the sophisticated role of Douyin as a platform for digital feminist expression, and the ways in which it can amplify both feminist discourse or, conversely, give voice to misogynistic attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politics and religion are traditionally connected in large democracies, with many examples in the Global South. Recently in Brazil, a specific Bible verse has been assimilated into political expression and amplified by social media: John 8:32 ("And you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free"). In this article, we employ thematic analysis of Twitter1 data referencing this verse, collected during the 2022 Brazilian presidential election. The analysis shows how the verse became symbolic shorthand for a bundle of values associated with political and religious righteousness, reinforcing the connections between conservative politics and religion. Strongly associated with the persona of former president Jair Bolsonaro, the verse was deployed by his supporters as a symbolic debunking tool against perceived misinformation but was also used ironically by Bolsonaro's detractors to criticize the former president. By zooming in on the multifaceted use of this Biblical verse in the online political sphere, this article illuminates the multilayered interconnections between political expression on social media, religion, and misinformation in the context of Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to academic and popular accounts that present generational characteristics from the outside, in a top-down manner, we explore how Gen Z constructs, narrates, and projects itself in real-time on TikTok—a prominent social media platform, dominated by Gen Z, that provides a valuable window into youth experience and cultural production. Based on a thematic analysis of 1918 public videos tagged #GenZ, as well as salient comments posted on these videos, we aim to explore inductively how Gen Z collectively portrays itself on TikTok. Our findings illustrate how, via creative processes of both internal and external self-definition, Gen Z portrays itself as a generation of contrasts: powerful and self-assured, yet vulnerable and damaged. Videos embrace a playful self-reflexivity about time that embodies Gen Z's self-awareness, sense of unity, and collective spirit. This research contributes to our understanding of both generational identity and youth social media participation; sitting at the intersection of these two bodies of knowledge, it facilitates a nuanced understanding of youth self-representation, online collective expression, and multimodal communication practices on a critically understudied social media platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though news representations of protest have been studied extensively, little is known about how media audiences critique such representations. Focusing on TikTok as a space for media criticism, this article examines how users employ the app to respond to representations of protest in mainstream news media. Content collected in the spring of 2021 illuminated two very distinct foci of discussion about news representations of protest: the Black Lives Matter movement and the Capitol riot. Our qualitative content analysis of TikTok videos and their related comments demonstrates how users employed TikTok's creative affordances to dissect specific news representations, critique the media apparatus, and expand news narratives. These findings shed light on the complex role of TikTok as a platform for media criticism—one that can be used for both democratic and non-democratic ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media are recognized as important outlets for youth political expression, yet the affordances of different platforms may shape the forms and styles of expression that young people deploy. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the ways social media affordances shape youth voice, this article examines young people's political expression on the popular app musical.ly in the context of the 2016 US presidential election. Employing quantitative and qualitative content analysis on 1651 youth-created videos, we examine how young people use platform affordances, political hashtags, and memetic dimensions to convey a range of expressive political practices. In particular, through the analysis of content, form, and stance, our research illuminates how social media afford collective political expression for youth, by allowing them to deliberately connect to an assumed like-minded audience with similar beliefs through the use of shared symbolic resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although youth of color, youth from lower socioeconomic brackets, and young women are among the heaviest users of social media technologies, their voices are almost entirely absent from current conversations about ethical design. Based on a close analysis of youth-produced technological autoethnographies, this article examines underrepresented youths' perspectives on their own social media use, as a way to inform more ethical and equitable design of digital platforms. By surfacing the ways in which socioeconomic status, race and gender shape the social media experiences of youth from underrepresented groups, our research thus advocates for the centering of difference, not universality, in digital technology design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scrolling through thousands of TikTok videos tagged #BlackLivesMatter, I see social media facilitating powerful political expression and activism, but also hate and trauma. Keywords: Youth online political expression; civic engagement; social media; TikTok; civic imagination EN Youth online political expression civic engagement social media TikTok civic imagination 109 111 3 03/08/21 20210201 NES 210201 My research - examining youth political expression in online spaces - stems from a longstanding belief in the empowering potential of young people's online political practices, and a desire to support youth as civic actors. [Extracted from the article]

There are many dimensions to the ongoing European refugee crisis, including economic, political, and humanitarian. Underlying them, however, is the issue of self -- other relations and, in particular, the ways in which Western societies imagine others and otherness, defined in cultural, religious, and political terms. At the core of this political imagination, we propose, are certain understandings of refugees, of how they think, feel, and intend to act. In this article, we aim to unpack the social and psychological mechanisms involved in taking the perspective of refugees on digital platforms. The focus here is on refugee-related memes shared on Reddit, and the conversations around these visual artifacts. Our findings indicate that participants in these forums most often construct the perspective of refugees from an outside position, based on a commitment to difference, and rarely try to identify with the situation of refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]