Social media has skyrocketed to popularity in the past few years. The Arab Spring in 2011 as well as the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns have fueled interest in how social media might affect citizens’ participation in civic and political life. In response, researchers have produced 36 studies assessing the relationship between social media use and participation in civic and political life. This manuscript presents the results of a meta-analysis of research on social media use and participation. Overall, the metadata demonstrate a positive relationship between social media use and participation. More than 80% of coefficients are positive. However, questions remain about whether the relationship is causal and transformative. Only half of the coefficients were statistically significant. Studies using panel data are less likely to report positive and statistically significant coefficients between social media use and participation, compared to cross-sectional surveys. The metadata also suggest that social media use has minimal impact on participation in election campaigns.

Scholars disagree about the impact of the Internet on civic and political engagement. Some scholars argue that Internet use will contribute to civic decline, whereas other scholars view the Internet as having a role to play in reinvigorating civic life. This article assesses the hypothesis that Internet use will contribute to declines in civic life. It also assesses whether Internet use has any significant effect on engagement. A meta-analysis approach to current research in this area is used. In total, 38 studies with 166 effects are examined. The meta-data provide strong evidence against the Internet having a negative effect on engagement. However, the meta-data do not establish that Internet use will have a substantial impact on engagement. The effects of Internet use on engagement seem to increase nonmonotonically across time, and the effects are larger when online news is used to measure Internet use, compared to other measures.

New technologies raise fears in public discourse. In terms of digital media use and youth, the advice has been to monitor and limit access to minimize the negative impacts. However, this advice would also limit the positive impacts of digital media. One such positive impact is increased engagement in civic and political life. This article uses meta-analysis techniques to summarize the findings from 106 survey-based studies (965 coefficients) about youth, digital media use, and engagement in civic and political life. In this body of research, there is little evidence to suggest that digital media use is having dire impacts on youth’s engagement. We find that the positive impacts depend on directly political uses of digital media, such as blogging, reading online news, and online political discussion. These online activities have off-line consequences on participation, such as contacting officials, talking politics, volunteering, and protesting. We also find a very strong relationship between online political activities, such as joining political groups and signing petitions, with off-line political activities, which undermine claims of slacktivism among youth. Finally, while research generally assumes a causal flow from digital media to participation, the evidence for the alternative causal flow is strong and has very different implications on interventions designed to address youth’s levels of engagement in civic and political life.

More than 300 studies have been published on the relationship between digital media and engagement in civic and political life. With such a vast body of research, it is difficult to see the big picture of how this relationship has evolved across time and across the globe. This article offers unique insights into how this relationship manifests across time and space, using a meta-analysis of existing research. This approach enables an analysis of a 20-year period, covering 50 countries and including survey data from more than 300,000 respondents. While the relationship may vary cross-nationally, the major story is the trend data. The trend data show a pattern of small, positive average coefficients turning into substantial, positive coefficients. These larger coefficients may be explained by the diffusion of this technology across the masses and changes in the types of use, particularly the rise of social networking sites and tools for online political participation.

Beginning in 2018, youth across the globe participated in protest activities aimed at encouraging government action on climate change. This activism was initiated and led by Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg. Like other contemporary movements, the School Strike 4 Climate used social media. For this article, we use Twitter trace data to examine the global dynamics of the student strike on March 15, 2019. We offer a nuanced analysis of 993 tweets, employing a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis. Like other movements, the primary function of these tweets was to share information, but we highlight a unique type of information shared in these tweets—documentation of local events across the globe. We also examine opinions shared about youth, the tactic (protest/strike), and climate change, as well as the assignment of blame on government and other institutions for their inaction and compliance in the climate crisis. This global climate strike reflects a trend in international protest events, which are connected through social media and other digital media tools. More broadly, it allows us to rethink how social media platforms are transforming political engagement by offering actors—especially the younger generation—agency through the ability to voice their concerns to a global audience.

Is the news media merely a tool for those already interested in politics, or can the news media stimulate interest in politics? While the news media likely serve both functions, little research has examined these dual functions and how television, print, and online news media differ in their performance of these functions. I use simultaneous equation modeling of 3-wave panel data from the American National Election Study (2008–2009) to examine the roles of different media in both stimulating and reinforcing political interest. The findings demonstrate that television news is a tool for those with prior interest in politics, more than a mechanism to influence levels of political interest. In contrast, online and print news can stimulate political interest to a greater degree than these media serve those with prior political interest. These differing relationships to political interest are explained in terms of the effort and attention required to use these news sources, their information-sharing capabilities, and their diversity of content.