Social Media and Political Participation among Indian Youth

Samreen Alvi

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i05.88220

Social Media and Political Participation among Indian Youth

Author(s)	Ms. Samreen Alvi
Country	India
Abstract	Social media has become a routine part of everyday life for young Indians, yet whether that everyday use has translated into greater political participation remains an open empirical question rather than a settled one. India's youngest voters came of political age exactly as internet access moved from a minority experience to a majority one, and campaigns, parties and civil-society actors have often treated reach on a platform as though it were the same thing as engagement with politics. This paper asks whether the growth of internet and social media access among Indian youth between 2019 and 2024 was accompanied by a matching growth in political participation, and if not, where the gap lies. It pursues four objectives: to map the growth of internet and social media access among Indian youth across this period; to compare that growth against Lok Sabha turnout and first-time-voter registration trends across the 2014, 2019 and 2024 general elections; to examine the gender and rural-urban gaps that condition who obtains access in the first place; and to identify which specific social-media-mediated activities, expressive, informational or corrective, Indian youth are actually observed to undertake. The paper draws entirely on secondary data: the Lokniti-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung 2019 survey on social media and political behaviour; three vintages of the Internet and Mobile Association of India's internet-adoption tracking (2019, 2020 and 2024); the National Family Health Survey-5 (2019-21); Election Commission of India turnout figures for 2014, 2019 and 2024; an Association for Democratic Reforms analysis of first-time-voter registration; and the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024 India chapter. The findings show a clear disjuncture: India's internet user base grew from about 504 million in late 2019 to 886 million in 2024, yet Lok Sabha turnout barely moved, standing at 66.4 percent in 2014, 67.11 percent in 2019 and 65.79 percent in 2024, and only 38 percent of eligible 18-19-year-olds had registered to vote ahead of the 2024 election, ranging from 17 percent in Bihar to 67 percent in Telangana. Access itself remains unevenly distributed: nationally, 57.1 percent of men but only 33.3 percent of women had ever used the internet as of 2019-21, and the gap widens further in rural areas. Where young Indians do engage politically online, the engagement is modest and platform-specific: only about a quarter of social media users report expressing political views even occasionally, and WhatsApp and YouTube, not Facebook or X, dominate as sources of political news. The paper concludes that rising connectivity is a necessary but clearly insufficient condition for rising political participation among Indian youth, and that policy attention should shift from expanding access in the abstract toward closing the specific gender and first-registration gaps that access growth has so far left untouched.
Keywords	voter turnout; digital divide; internet access; misinformation; gender gap; lok sabha elections; civic engagement
Field	Sociology > Politics
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 5, September-October 2026
Published On	2026-09-22
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i05.88220

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International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research

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Social Media and Political Participation among Indian Youth

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