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Young people are increasingly using social media to communicate and perform their civic and political aspirations. By combining automated text mining and manual content analysis to examine a large data set of online discussion posts, this study examined whether young people display interest in civic and political topics on an apolitical youth discussion forum and in what expressive patterns the topics appear. The study found a modest amount of civic and political discussion on the online peer space but also found that young people were particularly oriented to traditional political topics in addition to globally popular themes. Further analysis of the topics’ semantic networks revealed new patterns in young people’s online political expression. The study also identified six online political expression forms which provide a deeper understanding of the manners and resource intensity regarding the topics, and enable theoretical extensions of online political participation.
Sormanen et al. (Wed,) studied this question.