The present and future of political expression and mobilization on Social Media

By systematizing findings from multiple Social Media for Democracy studies, we characterize how digital political participation is evolving across the European Union. We show how political identity expression and mobilization on X/Twitter can be used to map the issue- and ideology-specific dynamics that structure contemporary online political participation and activism, including petition-related call-to-action campaigns and other digital mobilization practices.

We show that online mobilization builds on distinct platform affordances and is constructed on top of different types of signals of political orientation and identity, including those recoverable from profile biographies and follow networks. This enables us to link political ideology, identity, and mobilization in Europe’s digital public sphere, and to discuss the implications for future CSS research on online political engagement, societal divides and polarization within and across the EU. The findings of the studies we present, when considered jointly, allow for an in-depth comparative characterization of online mobilization repertoires across European countries, issues, and ideological camps.