Trending Topics, Growing Knowledge? How Curating Actors’ Political Social Media Content Affects Youth’s Political Knowledge

Whether youth can gain political knowledge through social media is long debated. Existing research has insufficiently accounted for different curating actors of political information, an indirect learning logic, and within-person changes. To fill these gaps, we conducted a large-scale three-wave panel study among 16- to 30-year-olds (NT3 = 2276) to examine how exposure to different social media actors such as politicians, peers, or influencers relates to the acquisition of current affairs knowledge over time. We investigated perceived opinion leadership gratifications as a novel underlying mechanism in this process. While increased exposure to all curating actors’ political content was related to higher opinion leadership gratifications in the same wave, we found little indirect learning effects over time on the within-person level through obtained gratifications. This association emerged only during the national election period, when perceived opinion leadership gratifications from peers’ political content were linked to above-usual gains in objective political knowledge over time.