Civic laboratories: youth political expression in anonymous, ephemeral, geo-bounded social media

ABSTRACT

While political expression is theoretically important for young citizens, research finds that young people approach expression on dominant social media (e.g., Facebook) with trepidation and uncertainty. What might a social media that facilitates youth political expression look like? We address this question by examining young people’s experiences with the mobile social media Yik Yak, whose affordances (i.e., anonymity, geo-boundedness, ephemerality) offer a theoretically beneficial infrastructure for political expression. Using in-depth interviews conducted during the 2016 US election, we find that Yik Yak’s affordances allowed users to assess the opinions of their peers, experiment with political expression and articulate their political voices. Participants also raised concerns over whether political talk on social media like Yik Yak could result in substantive dialogue or meaningful change. Based on our findings, we propose the concept of civic laboratories, which are social media that maximize opportunities for experimentation with political expression, while minimizing social risk.

KEYWORDS:

• Politics
• expression
• young people
• anonymity
• ephemerality
• geo-bounded

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Daniel Lane holds a BS degree in Television, Radio & Film from Syracuse University. He studies the role social media plays in engaging people in the world of political and social change. His work seeks to understand how communication on social media leverages identities and social connections to promote expression, deliberation and action [email: [email protected]].

Vishnupriya Das holds an MSc degree in Contemporary India from the University of Oxford. She is interested in the interaction between technology use and identity formation among migrant communities and the gendered nature of media production and consumption [email: [email protected]].

Dan Hiaeshutter-Rice holds an MPP degree from the University of Michigan – Ford School of Public Policy. His research interests center around political information markets. He is primarily interested in mediated political campaign communication and the effects of platform norms on political information. His work includes big social data, message characteristic effects, new versus traditional media and opinion leadership [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1 During our research, Yik Yak changed how anonymity was established several times. Most of our data come from participants’ experiences during the period in which users’ identities were cued simply by a random icon and an optional handle.

2 While Whites make up the majority of the university population we sampled from, we note that they are further over-represented in our sample. Given the anonymity of Yik Yak, we are unable to determine whether the racial/ethnic makeup of our sample is reflective of Yik Yak’s user base or our sampling strategy.