For years, we’ve understood media bias and its role in politics. At the intersection of new media and political landscapes, research shows digital media’s covert re-affirmation of young people’s political identities.
Changing Landscapes
Media and politics have changed in the 21st century. Much discourse has focused on young people, and understandably so; the John Smith Centre’s 2026 Youth Poll found 61% of young people use social media as a regular news source, while only a collective 23% intend to vote for Westminster’s two historically dominant parties. Young people are in the middle of these two quickly shifting worlds.
Last month, the government opened a major consultation into children’s “digital wellbeing,” with online information a key point of enquiry. Engaging with young people, parents, and guardians is a positive step, as discourse too often takes place about and without young people, perpetuating moral panic.
See last year’s response to Netflix’s Adolescence miniseries, understood and promoted by the Prime Minister as a one-size-fits-all cautionary tale of how “ideology” is “pumped into the minds of our children” online.
These discourses show what youth studies literature has told us for years – rather than engaging with our imagined “figures” of youth, we’d do well to listen young people themselves, and the research about them. In my dissertation, Right-Wing Youth Politics & Media: Changing Landscapes, I sought to do just that; interviewing seven self-identified right-wing people aged 18–25 to explore the intersection of media and political identities. While not right-wing myself, I chose this demographic having recognised its over-representation in sensationalised discourse.
The Construction(?) of Opinion
Many in youth studies critique the notion of young people unthinkingly absorbing media messaging. The young people I’ve interviewed showed nuance in the selection of media sources and the reception of information.
Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1973) tells us that audiences’ reception of media messaging is defined by their existing positions, and perception of the wider context – media can’t simply tell people what to think, it needs to “speak the[ir] language.”
Curran & Seaton (2018) suggest that media’s power lies in “agenda-setting,” or redefining these perceptions of the wider context. Not telling consumers what to think, but what to think about, with the eventual potential of influencing opinion.
Later scholars, like those in the University of Glasgow’s own Media Group, explore how this process is accelerated and individualised by more interactive digital media, where content is algorithmically recommended rather than chosen.
Boundaries break down online; consumers simultaneously act as producers, alternative media shares space with mainstream outlets, and digital platform owners regulate it all, able to steer the agenda by selectively curating audiences’ home pages (Happer, 2024: 62).
Speaking the Language
Considering the above, my research’s foremost finding was the lens participants consumed media through; the way that their positions, and their perception of the context, influenced how they assess media. Particularly, our interviews highlighted how fluid the terms of what is and isn’t “neutral” are between viewers. While we avoided in-depth political discussion, participants overwhelmingly self-assessed as moderate-right, and described interpersonal stigmatisation in youth-dominated spaces like social media or universities, where they perceived a broad left-bias.
“I find campus to be like; they just won’t listen to you at all if you’re not massively left-wing.”
This description extended to the wider culture and, importantly, to “the media.” This is the lens my participants consumed information through – the lens of their existing opinion and experiences, an important element of audience agency often overlooked in mainstream discussions.
With this, a demand was shared for unbiased platforms to enable participation, and equally unbiased media sources. Alongside a few select outlets, including podcasts with pro-free speech and anti-mainstream appeals in their branding, X was overwhelmingly favoured among social media platforms.
“There needs to be an X, there needs to be a space where that can happen, where there can just be maximum openness.”
Since its acquisition and rebranding by Elon Musk, the app has presented itself as a no-nonsense, uncensored bastion of free speech. For an audience member trying to cut through media bias, X looks like a dream: “rapid-fire, short form information bursts,” as one participant described, alongside the ease of access to expert firsthand accounts, seem to leave little room for bias.
Critics question this assessment, however. The site has been found to algorithmically bolster right-wing perspectives, been accused of silencing left-wing critics, and sees 20 of its top 25 political accounts right-leaning (with Musk himself as the largest).
Rather than “cultural dupes” (Threadgold, 2020: 691) completely open to messaging, young people bring their existing perspectives and demands to the media landscape. In this case, stigmatisation of “moderate-right” self-identity led to a perceived left-wing cultural bias, and a demand for unbiased openness.
Meeting this demand with an algorithmic right-wing bias under pro-free speech marketing, X facilitates engagement with a disproportionately right-wing environment – re-affirming the original “moderate-right” identity.
Nothing to be Done?
This leads to one of the project’s most important findings – naturalising of algorithmic recommendation.
“The algorithm is non-political,”
said one participant, owing his encounters with X’s more extreme content to the platform’s well-intentioned guesses at what he’d be interested in. The online landscape sees legacy media’s outward biases turned covert. Another participant felt able to “curate” an unbiased feed of online content. X isn’t alone in quietly steering its users’ discursive ship; platforms like YouTube share this potential.
This is perhaps the greatest informational risk of social media; agenda-setting through bombardment with bias, in response to good-faith attempts to engage with diverse perspectives, resulting here in the re-affirmation of existing positions.
Going after mis- and disinformation, the recently rejected social media ban for under-16s misdiagnosed the problem, and prescribed an unhelpful solution. Rather than chasing users by restricting access (which doesn’t work in practice), legislation should target cagey algorithms, require platforms open up about what they promote and how, and let users decide themselves who is and isn’t a “free speech absolutist.”
In short, young people aren’t uniquely vulnerable to this agenda-setting; like any other demographic, they aren’t simply told what to think and radicalised by social media.
In my research, however, participants’ openness to a range of perspectives was covertly met with algorithms’ boosting of their “side;” not quite an echo-chamber of beliefs they already held, but a skewed discourse that re-affirms their “moderate-right” self-assessment.
Isaac McCrory is a final year undergraduate student of Sociology and Politics at the University of Glasgow. He is interested in media sociology, youth studies, and populist politics.
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