The political is (inter)personal

A sneak peek at new book Behind Their Screens: What Teens are Facing (And Adults are Missing) by Drs. Emily Weinstein and Carrie James

Aug 15, 2022

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Gather ‘round, techno sapiens. We have an extra special guest edition today. Drs. Emily Weinstein and Carrie James—Harvard researchers and friends of mine (who also happen to be very nice humans)—wrote a book! It’s called Behind Their Screens: What Teens are Facing (And Adults are Missing), and it is excellent. Carrie and Emily surveyed over 3,500 teens about their media use over multiple years, and the result is this in-depth look at the complexities of teens’ digital lives. I found it absolutely fascinating.

Luckily for us, they’ve agreed to let me print an excerpt from one of my favorite chapters: The Political is (Inter)personal—and Vice Versa, which covers the complicated dynamics of how politics play out in teens’ social media lives. Other chapters cover everything from sexting and screen time to social drama and privacy concerns, centering teens’ worries and perspectives along the way. The book comes out tomorrow (!), so please enjoy this snippet and grab your own copy here.

6 min read

In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, sixteen-year-old Ruby saw videos popping up on TikTok that used poll data from Instagram to expose people who supported a certain candidate. For example, after teens created and posted polls asking questions like “Biden or Trump?,” they used the data to create video mashups. The mashup videos would begin, “Here are the people who support Y,” followed by strategically curated, rapid- fire photo compilations of candidate Y supporters. The strategy was typically something like this: screenshot and use only unflattering pictures of candidate Y’s supporters, and only flattering pictures of X’s supporters. The resulting compilation made teens’ stances public with a clear message that those who support the creator’s preferred candidate are superior and attractive, and those who support the other candidate are comparatively ugly or uncool— or both.

Ruby shared the strong majority view in her community, so it wasn’t that she feared her personal candidate preference would evoke backlash if made public through a mashup. Rather, the weaponization of social media in this way— and its contribution to what felt like growing polarization among her peers— made her uneasy.

This story is another example of how social media is a dynamic and contested space for youth engagement, including with electoral politics. It also begins to surface tensions that today’s teens give voice to as they navigate contexts where the personal and political are increasingly, often painfully, intertwined.

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Friendships are on the line

[...] Current social pressures to speak out about timely civic issues are palpable, putting friendships literally on the line. Teens judge and feel judged by friends and peers for the presence and absence of posts on trending civic topics. The when, what, where, and frequency of posts about civic issues are all under the microscope—and what is said and unsaid can reaffirm, strain, or break friendships.

[...]Nanaa describes how some teens actively monitor their peers’ posts—and what they see, or don’t see, determines friendship status: “I had a lot of friends who are minorities and this summer, they were like, ‘I’m watching . . . which one of my friends are reposting things and . . . if you haven’t said anything about BLM, then you don’t care about me and you’re not my friend’. . . . people genuinely will break friendships over someone not like using their platform and like posting about it.” While Nanaa doesn’t monitor her friends in these ways, she understands the motivation. Echoing the theme of “silence is taking sides,” she believes that “not picking a side is not an option because that means that you don’t care.”

The dominant beliefs in a teen’s community (liberal, conservative, mixed) determine reception of posts and associated social consequences. Genevieve, a White teen who lives in an ideologically mixed community has publicly “picked a side” and suffered the (interpersonal) consequences. She lost not only thirty-plus followers, but also at least one friend. She explained, “I never really spoke about human rights issues . . . and then when I did, I started to lose followers. . . . I’ve also had my stuff posted on other people’s private Stories and then they’re saying mean things about me.” She recounted people who responded to tell her they disagreed with her or even to inform her their friendship was over: “I posted something supporting Biden and this girl on my swim team swiped up and she was like, ‘oh, like, I’m not gonna be friends with you anymore’ . . . and I have not talked to her in months because this happened like a while back, and she just hasn’t talked to me.”

Ruby’s story about TikTok posts to expose people’s political beliefs was part of a broader climate of intolerance for peers who weren’t politically liberal; in Genevieve’s case, it was her liberal views that were out of step with her peer group and caused interpersonal issues. Despite the obvious social costs, Genevieve persisted, sustained by the belief that the issues are bigger than her: “I have to post . . . because, like, I feel like things need to be said . . . things need to be shared. . . . Things need to change in the country.”

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Performative Activism

[...] The term “performative activism” is well known to today’s teens as a common allegation and ongoing source of struggle. It goes both ways. Teens interrogate the authenticity of peers’ civic posts while puzzling over how they themselves can be authentic.

Knowing what’s authentic versus performative on social media can be hard to pin down. Teens nonetheless often feel, rightly or not, that they can decipher the authenticity of peers’ posts.

Easy forms of digital activism are quickly labeled as performative, and at times they are. “Tagging chains” are a prime example. Participating in an invitation to “tag six of your friends who also believe in Black Lives Matter” requires minimal effort and shows little evidence of further commitment to a cause. For Jade, these tagging chains both “trivialize the movement” and are ultimately self-centering: “it’s a way to subtly bring attention back to yourself rather than truly to the movement at hand.”

The presence or absence of actionable information in a post can be seen as a further indicator of authentic commitment to an issue versus paying lip service. Teens take notice when posts express outrage about an issue or indicate moral support but don’t include links to news, information about a rally/protest, an e-petition, or a site to collect donations for the cause. As one teen put it: “If you’re not posting to, like, actually help those situations then are you really even doing anything?”)

As teens read peers’ posts for signs of performativity, they triangulate with other data, both from their in-person interactions and the person’s posting history. Who continues to post about issues? Who shows up to post when a topic is hot but then exits once the moment has passed and they “stop caring about looking good”? Lil Ronny says he can tell “who are the people who fake it” versus those who are committed. “Because there’s people who would show up [to the protest], take a couple of pictures, be like, ‘oh yeah everybody pop out’ and then they leave. And then there’s . . . the people who walk at least over two, three miles for a cause and actually go ahead and pursue that change.” Teens take quick notice, too, of misalignment between how some people act in school (“who’s standing up for oppressed groups?”) and what they’re posting online. Other studies of teens’ experiences with political online posts similarly point to alertness to “fake wokeness,” meaning posts shared mainly to impress others.1

Attempting to suss out performativity online seems almost reflexive, and it likely has roots in identity development.2 In a pre-Instagram world, Nakkula and Toshalis described the friction between adolescents when peers observe what they see as differences in behavior across contexts: “Why are you like that with them but like this with me? Which is the real you?”3 Social media is yet another context where adolescents are under the watchful eye of peers who take quick note of any potential inconsistencies. And yet, this is a puzzle for teens who are in the very process of developing their own views and civic identities, still learning about new issues and finding their footing as they learn to articulate personal stances.4

In the digital public sphere, it doesn’t seem to take much to create friction. For example, posting about a civic issue if one hasn’t before might be judged by peers as discrepant and inauthentic. What seems inauthentic may indeed be a shallow attempt to avoid social censure. Or, what appears like a random jumping “right on the bandwagon” may instead be first steps in a young person’s trajectory of building a civic identity.

In case you missed it

Kaskazi and Kitzie, “Engagement at the Margins.”

Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis.

Michael J. Nakkula and Eric Toshalis, Understanding Youth: Adolescent Development for Educators (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2006), 33.

Flanagan and Faison, “Youth Civic Development”; James Youniss, Jeffrey A. McLellan, and Miranda Yates, “What We Know about Engendering Civic Identity,” American Behavioral Scientist 40, no. 5 (1997): 620–631.