Semi-Private Spheres as Safe Spaces for Young Social Media Users' Political Conversation

Abstract

The incorporation of social media as spaces for political participation performances—especially among youth—has brought various issues into debate, including the formats of these practices and, at the same time, the significances of these repertoires for public conversation. In order to address this topic, this chapter explores the digital practices of political participation among young people in Argentina. Based on a qualitative approach in which 30 in-depth interviews to people from 18 to 24 years old were carried out, the findings of this research note that these segments of the population join the discussion of issues on the public agenda using emojis and hashtags and prefer reduced digital spaces to talk with their close contacts about polarized issues in order to avoid the aggression and violence that they say they observe in the digital space.