Written by Tarja Laaninen.
As social media has become the main gateway to information for many young people, how will it influence the youth vote in the 2024 European elections? The turnout among young people in the 2019 European elections was relatively high, and many hope for a repeat performance in June this year. But ahead of the 2024 elections, the main European institutions have largely ‘excluded’ themselves from one of the most popular video-sharing platforms among young people – TikTok – over data security concerns. Social media in itself is a difficult phenomenon to study, as recommendation algorithms mean that everyone sees different content.
Social media as a new campaign front in elections
According to Eurostat, 84 % of young people in the EU used the internet to participate in social media networks during 2022. Social media platforms have thus become a significant channel for political campaigning. As an example, the spring 2023 parliamentary elections in Finland were dubbed the ‘first TikTok elections‘, with some of the young candidates gaining publicity – and a seat in the parliament – quite possibly thanks to their visibility in the social media used by teens and young adults. Back then, some 70 % of 18-21 year-olds said they had seen political advertising on TikTok. Social media platforms are also the dominant news sources for 16-24 year-olds. TikTok, as the 24/7 news channel for many young people, has surged in popularity in recent years in Europe, particularly against rivals such as X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat. Fact-checking services have found that social media platforms’ recommendation systems have a ‘funnelling effect‘, promoting a narrow selection of videos and narrowing the range of views to which users are exposed. There are concerns, but not yet enough research, as to whether social media and its recommendation algorithms are pushing users into bubbles, echo chambers with like-minded users, or even to ‘rabbit holes’ towards increasingly extreme content.
Young people’s participation in European elections and their media habits
The European Youth Forum has been campaigning to lower the voting age to 16; this is a national competence, however, and is therefore for the Member States to decide. In the 2024 European elections, four Member States (Belgium, Germany, Malta and Austria) will allow their citizens to vote from the age of 16, and in Greece the voting age is 17.
After declining ever since the first European elections in 1979, electoral turnout in the 2019 elections rose by 8 percentage points compared with 2014, reaching 50.6 %. This increase was driven by a surge in youth participation. The results of a Eurobarometer survey on youth and democracy published on 13 May 2024 show that 64 % of young people (aged 15 to 30) plan to vote in the upcoming European elections. However, 19 % of young people say they are not interested in politics and 13 % say they are not interested in voting. Although voting was considered the most effective action for making their voices heard by decision-makers, ‘engaging in social media’ came in second place, selected by 32 % of the young respondents.
A 2023 European Parliament study highlights that ‘young people have never withdrawn from politics or become inactive, but engage in various forms’. Social media is the preferred channel for young people’s online political engagement, offering the possibility to mobilise a massive number of people, at an incredible speed, across borders. On social media, young people inform themselves about politics and current affairs that they consider relevant to them.
The Eurobarometer News & Media Survey 2023 showed that, while older respondents have a preference for using the website of the news source (of a newspaper etc.) to access news, younger respondents are more likely read articles or posts that appear in their online social networks, or content shared by friends on messaging apps. Compared with the previous survey conducted in 2022, the use of TikTok as an online social media platform had increased across all age groups.
Examples of EU policies affecting social media ahead of the elections
In its meeting of 15 May 2024, the European Commission discussed the danger of disinformation accelerating ahead of the June elections. ‘Disinformation is on the rise, cheaper to produce with artificial intelligence and more widely distributed through social media’, Commission Vice-President Věra Jourová warned. The Commission had identified narratives that are pushed to undermine trust in media and election processes, and warned about deepfake video or audio clips trying to discredit candidates shortly before the elections.
In February 2023, the Commission, the European Parliament and the Council banned their staff from using TikTok on their devices using work-related apps, owing to cyber security concerns. The Parliament also blocks the app on its internal Wi-Fi. However, during the winter and spring of 2024, ahead of the European elections, many of the candidates and the Parliament finally went back on the app, considering their presence on TikTok to be essential if they want to reach young voters.
The Commission has taken numerous actions regarding social platforms under the recent Digital Services Act – for example, requesting more information from X on its content moderation activities, in particular curtailing its team of content moderators and reducing linguistic coverage from eleven EU languages to seven. The Commission has also opened probes into Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, as well as TikTok. Although critical voices in the fact-checking community point out that these probes are too late to make a change ahead of the European elections, they will be useful for the future.
A strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation, signed by 44 companies – including Google, Meta and TikTok – was set up in 2022. The signatories committed to taking action in several areas to combat disinformation, inter alia setting up a rapid response system to ensure swift cooperation during election periods. Originally among the signatories, X later withdrew from the code in May 2023.
A year ahead of the elections, the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) established a Task Force on the 2024 European Elections. The EDMO fact-checking network, covering all 27 EU Member States, has been publishing daily, weekly and monthly reports analysing disinformation narratives and trends linked to the European elections at national, regional and European level, as well as investigations to counter disinformation. Examples of disinformation circulating ahead of the elections include the EU ‘forcing people to eat insect food‘ against their will, and various themes linked to the Green Deal, such as the EU wanting to ban repairing cars older than 15 years. In Germany, false stories about how to use voting ballots have been circulating that would actually make the vote invalid.
On 21 May 2024, the Council approved conclusions on safeguarding elections from foreign interference, providing an overview of the various mechanisms that the EU has at its disposal. On 10 May, Eurostat also launched a temporary fact-checking service for the election period.
Possible future steps
According to the 2023 News & Media Eurobarometer, 79 % of young Europeans (aged between 15 and 24) follow influencers – content creators who post content on social media and video-sharing platforms – while only 14 % of those aged over 55 do so. In the meeting of Education, Youth, Culture and Sport Ministers on 14 May 2024, the Council adopted conclusions on the rise of influencers as part of the EU’s media ecosystem, noting that influencers are having an increasing impact on the online content and information that people consume on a daily basis in the EU. While this impact is often positive, it can potentially be harmful, both to individuals’ mental health and at a societal level in areas such as democracy. The Council conclusions stress that influencers need media literacy skills to understand the potential negative impact of sharing mis- and disinformation, online hate speech, cyberbullying and other illegal or harmful content.
Among the recommendations proposed by the EU Youth Conference – held in March 2024 in Ghent, Belgium, as part of the 10th cycle of the EU Youth Dialogue – is a proposal to implement critical thinking workshops in schools, enabling youngsters to gain long-term critical thinking and media literacy skills. The youth representatives also proposed that the EU should, in cooperation with the Member States, establish a campaign for young people on how to identify quality information and fight disinformation.
Read this ‘at a glance’ on ‘Youth, social media and the European elections‘ in the Think Tank pages of the European Parliament.
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