Social Media and Political Participation among Young Voters: A Review of Political Awareness and Voting Behaviour

Abstract

The rapid diffusion of social media platforms has fundamentally reshaped how young citizens encounter, interpret, and act upon political information. The relationship between social media use and political participation among young voters, with a particular focus on political awareness and voting behaviour. Drawing on twenty peer-reviewed studies, the paper examines how platforms such as Facebook, Twitter (now X), Instagram, YouTube, function as arenas of political socialisation, mobilisation, and expression for citizens aged roughly eighteen to thirty. The literature indicates that social media exerts a modest but consistent positive influence on political awareness and both online and offline participation, though the magnitude of this effect is conditioned by platform affordances, the credibility of political content, network composition, and individual-level motivations. At the same time, the review highlights persistent concerns regarding misinformation, echo chambers, affective polarisation, and the gap between low-effort "clicktivism" and substantive democratic engagement. Methodologically, the paper adopts a narrative-cum-thematic review design, organising findings into four analytical clusters: political awareness and information exposure, mobilisation and turnout, online political expression and activism, and the risks associated with algorithmic curation. The review concludes that while social media broadens the informational and participatory repertoire available to young voters, its democratic value depends heavily on media literacy, platform governance, and the quality of the information ecosystem. Directions for future research include longitudinal and cross-national designs, platform-specific analyses, and greater attention to the causal mechanisms linking digital exposure to concrete voting behaviour.