Use of social media among young people and digital citizenship: analysis after COVID-19

Abstract

This article is part of a project approved and funded by the Research Council of Social Sciences and Humanities of Canada, on social media, citizen participation and education. The objective is to explore and understand the impacts of the use, dissemination and production of social networks on citizen participation and democracy. Ours is an interpretive, descriptive study of the behavior of young people and corresponds to its initial phase. An online questionnaire has been answered by 127 students, of whom 95,05% are Spanish. This paper presents the most significant qualitative and quantitative results, as well as the critical issues based on the results obtained with the ATLAS-ti tool, to identify relevant guidelines and establish a framework that offers a meaning to the answers, and concludes that the problems to which young people surveyed make more references in relation to the use of social networks are the ethical problems for instance: the deception, cruelty, cyberbullying, the use of networks to disqualify or discredit people, competitiveness, disrespect for other people's opinions, unfounded judgements and the existence of "dark" content, which leads us to question how this fact positively or negatively affects their understanding of "citizen participation".