June 6, 2025
By Kameliya Tomova

Digital activism is evolving fast. Young campaigners are at the forefront, harnessing AI technologies and short-form video to engage audiences with greater precision, creativity and impact. A 2024 UNICEF report highlights that young people are increasingly leveraging digital tools to drive civic action, raise awareness, and organise collective responses to global challenges. Social media, among all else, is growing into an active space for building campaigns that inform, connect and mobilise. From TikTok and Instagram to WhatsApp and Viber, volunteers are engaging communities that conventional civic approaches frequently overlook. Amid these shifts, the Council of Europe has designated 2025 the European Year of Digital Citizenship Education, recognising the urgent need to equip all learners with the values, skills and knowledge to thrive in the digital public sphere.

Naturally, this comes with countless challenges. Disinformation spreads easily, algorithms can distort reach, and many feel overwhelmed by online noise. Still, this is a moment civic educators cannot afford to miss. With tools ranging from fact-based storytelling to virtual reality, we can offer clarity, agency and hope, helping more people understand their rights and the role they play in a democracy.

Nowhere is this digital shift more apparent than in politics. Romania’s recent presidential election showed just how powerful political tech has become in polarised democracies. Data-driven advocacy groups and tech organisations such as Electica, SoSha and Declic use voter data, microtargeting, algorithmic amplification and digital mobilisation to shape both turnout and public narrative. Their strategies aren’t just about persuasion: they reframe political discourse in real time, offering lessons in how digital campaigning can empower.

In contrast, Poland’s presidential run-off on 1 June 2025 provides a far less encouraging example. A Global Witness investigation found that TikTok’s recommender system served new, politically balanced users more than twice as much nationalist-right content as centrist or left-wing material (five times more in some tests), thereby boosting candidate Karol Nawrocki’s visibility over rival Rafał Trzaskowski. The European Commission is now probing whether such algorithmic skew breaches the Digital Services Act’s election-integrity provisions.

Taken together, the Romanian and Polish cases show how easily platform governance can bend the electoral field. What this means for civic education is that our media literacy toolkit would need to clearly explain things like (1) how voter data is harvested and traded; (2) how ranking systems surface or bury content; and (3) which legal levers, like the EU’s Digital Services Act, let citizens challenge abuses.

Yet, understanding these mechanics is only half the work. Civic educators don’t have to stay in permanent watchdog mode; they can seize the initiative and shape the online ecosystem themselves.

Recent NECE Campus sessions have armed educators with hands-on, forward-looking tools – targeted video campaigns, data-driven social-media ads, and hope-based messaging – that shift civic work from digital fire-fighting to actively mobilising citizens online. In our session, Amplifying digital activism in civic education, researchers from the University of Glasgow showed how rights-based videos can measurably boost democratic understanding, even among disengaged youth. In Running effective social media ad campaigns for civic impact, we looked into how civil society can use Meta’s ad tools for targeted outreach and mobilisation. We also turned to hope-based communication as a strategic move away from fear-driven messaging, towards narratives that empower, connect and inspire.

Stay tuned for more on this topic and join us in reimagining how we teach, reach and act online.