Use of Social Media for Political Participation by Youths

Abstract

<jats:p>This study investigated use of social media for political participation among youths in Oyo state, Nigeria; specifically, the types of social media used for political participation, the types of political activities social media are used for, as well as factors influencing use of the media for political participation. Survey research design was adopted for the study. Data was collected through questionnaire from 322 youths in three Nigerian universities. Findings reveal that social media was highly used by the youths for political participation. Facebook (98.8%) was found to be the most used, followed by Whatsapp (93.8%), Instagram (60.2%), Twitter (55.3%), and Yahoo Messenger (50.9%) respectively. Majorly, the youths used social media to participate in political advocacy (95.3%), political campaigns (91.9%), communicating with politicians (90.7%), political discussions (87.3%), monitoring and reporting electoral malpractices (85.1%), public consultations (80.4%), joining interest groups that engage in lobbying (64.9%), blogging about political issues (64.9%), and writing letters to public officials (51.2%). Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, subjective norms, and computer self-efficacy significantly influence use of social media for political participation, which suggests that these factors could be considered when promoting use of social media for political participation among youths. Given the growing popularity and penetration of social media and the way they influence peoples’ lives, the empirical findings of this study add to understanding how and why social media use will function in motivating citizens to be involved in political activities.</jats:p>

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“…Nigerian youths were quite enthusiastic in the use of social media to drum support for the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Austria (CC BY 3.0), 2022. candidates, especially for the presidential elections. As Omotayo & Folorunso (2020) have observed, youths leveraged social media, especially Facebook to actively participate in Nigeria's 2019 electoral processes. The two frontline candidates, Buhari and Abubakar, equally utilized Facebook to market their candidature and manifestoes as well as mobilize support.…”

“…A study by Omotayo & Folorunso (2020) reveals that youths leveraged social media in Nigeria's recent elections, especially Facebook, to participate in the political processes. The active involvement of youths in the 2019 politics through social media platforms, especially Facebook was described as a paradigm-changing development in political participation (Mustapha & Omar, 2020).…”

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“…In the online realm, Internet skills have been indicated as facilitators of youth political participation (Wang et al, 2018 ). Various measures of social media ability have been linked to better political participation, such as social media self-efficacy (Omotayo and Folorunso, 2020 ; Hoffmann and Lutz, 2021 ), prosumption, and information literacy (Yamamoto and Nah, 2018 ; Tugtekin and Koc, 2020 ; Yamamoto et al, 2020 ) and creative expressions (Yu and Oh, 2018 ; Zhu et al, 2019 ). For this present study, we operationalized SMPP-related skills and abilities as social media competence (Zhu et al, 2020 ), which includes four domains, such as technical usability, content interpretation, content generation, and anticipatory reflection.…”

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