“CLIMATE JUSTICE IS RACIAL JUSTICE”: THE YOUTH CLIMATE MOVEMENT AND INTERSECTIONAL MEDIA ORGANIZING IN AN ALGORITHMIC SOCIETY

Abstract

Before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, the world saw unprecedented levels of youth mobilization. From Black Lives Matter to March for Our Lives to the Youth Climate Strikes, the past decade saw young people leveraging social media to build movements around the world. Existing studies have shown how young people use social media to build movements in liberal democracies under the conditions of free assembly and association. However, since the global pandemic hit, young people (and others) have had to face various constraints to street mobilization. During the pandemic, as youth movements come to depend heavily on digital tools for organizing, social media platforms and algorithms may further complicate the process by which young people’s exercise political power. Using the broader youth climate movement as a case study, I examine how youth movements shift their tactics in response to the pandemic, and what the implications of shifting to the digital space are for the youth climate movement. This study draws on in-depth interviews with youth climate activists, along with digital ethnography and surveys, conducted between 2019 and 2021. Findings show that young climate organizers galvanized social media to shift to remote and hybrid organizing tactics. At the same time, inequalities introduced by social media platforms and algorithms became more acute for the youth movement.