Ungas politiska deltagande på sociala medier : Ungas upplevelser av det politiska klimatet på sociala medier under den svenska valrörelsen 2022

Sammanfattning: During recent years, there has been a major change in the way people engage in politics. The introduction of social media to the world, as well as the fact that the number of members of political parties has halved between 1990 and 2010, are part of a major shift in the study of political participation and engagement. This change shows that there has been a switch in political engagement, from the traditional representative democracy institutions to a much more digital way. Having taken this into consideration, this study aims to explore how young first-time Swedish voters experienced the political climate on social media during the Swedish general election in 2022. The focal point of this study is firstly to answer how the voters believe that the political climate on social media affected their political gathering of information ahead of the election. Secondly, to gain a deeper understanding of the students' opinions and experiences on politics in social media in relation to concepts like tolerance, freedom of speech, intolerance and censorship. And thirdly, if these experiences seem to influence the first-time voters' political participation and engagement on social media. The theoretical framework is foremost based on Henrik Bang’s theory on project-oriented identities, John Stuart Mill's understanding of freedom of speech and political scientist Sigal Ben-Porath’s definition on censorship. The method that will carry out this paper is face-to-face interviews with 10 upper secondary school students in a social science class in Orebro. The chosen method is content analysis, combined with an analysis scheme which will outline the empirical collection based on four main categories. The results show that the first-time voters did not use social media voluntarily for political information gathering, but that it rather happened because social media is part of their everyday life. The study also demonstrates that the first-time voters considered the political climate on social media as relatively harsh. Their opinions also vary regarding the political climate in relation to tolerance, freedom of speech, intolerance and censorship. Lastly, it was rather difficult to know with certainty whether the first-time voters’ experiences of the political climate had an impact on their political participation and engagement or not, but that it may possibly have been the case.