23/02/2026

Youth, Democracy and Truth: Political and civic participation at the crossroads of technology, literacy and youth mobilisation

by Miguel Paisana

The first discussions about what would become the SmartVote project began in September 2024, just over a year ago. From early on, it was clear that there was a desire (and a need) to create a consortium that would combine the rigour and impartiality of an academic approach with experience in working with civil society, identifying its most vulnerable audiences, particularly young people, and the most effective way to collaborate with them to produce an impact that would be felt not only by these audiences, but also in the wider public sphere.

Discussions between Iberian partners from Spain and Portugal focused immediately on the common challenges faced by both countries: for different reasons, there are clear trends of change in Spanish and Portuguese society at the political level, which pose challenges at the local, regional, national and international levels, largely associated with the fact that we live in a very specific political and communicational reality. Alongside the acceleration of news cycles and polarised political debate, there are profound discussions taking place about the role of technology in general, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in particular, in these two areas, and about the concern and impact of disinformation on the health of democracy.

All these changes are taking place within the broader context of profound political and communicational changes, which are occurring as a result of technological and cultural changes over the last few decades and which particularly impact young people, setting them apart from older generations. Among younger people, the first processes of socialisation into politics, democracy and public life now take place not through traditional institutions (school, family, media, etc.) but via social networks and other algorithmic curation structures (Pariser, 2011).

These structures are based on ideologies and architectures designed to capture attention, either by presenting content that confirms the user’s view, polarising content that opposes the user’s view, or both. These changes in the construction of knowledge and political awareness also have a profound impact at the institutional level, changing power dynamics and redefining by whom, how, when, and why the media and political agenda are determined (Cobb & Elder, 1971; Cobb et al., 2011).

The first report produced under the SmartVote project (Paisana et al., 2025), created as a basis for the project’s work, explores these aspects in depth, providing concrete data on the Spanish and Portuguese reality and, in a comparative exercise, identifying what the two societies have in common and what sets them apart, beyond the historical familiarity and friendship that unites them.

Both countries underwent virtually simultaneous democratic transitions in the 1970s, culminating in the drafting of constitutional documents that formalised similar values as the basis for their democracies. However, there are numerous dynamic differences in the functioning of the Spanish and Portuguese political systems, whether due to the levels of decentralisation of Spanish political structures compared to Portuguese ones or simply because we are talking about a constitutional monarchy in Spain and a semi-presidential republic in Portugal.

Some 50 years after the Spanish and Portuguese Constitutions were drafted, Spain and Portugal now face similar challenges. Although Spain shows more pronounced political polarisation than Portugal, in recent years Portugal has also seen increases in this type of polarisation (Coppedge et al., 2025) and, in electoral terms, similar problems have been identified, such as low voter turnout among young people, motivated by disengagement from politicians and political parties, economic and labour precariousness, and also identity issues (Paisana et al., 2025).

This vulnerability, in particular, has been exploited in recent years by populist movements and parties, especially on the right, which have found in younger voters the oxygen they need to sustain their political rise. Young people, in turn, identify with the narratives of these parties, which appear to respond directly to their problems while highlighting the inability of the democratic system to historically create living conditions similar to those of previous generations, particularly those of the post-Second World War era.

As part of the SmartVote project, we have identified some trends that explain the generational differences felt today in the Iberian Peninsula, and which are at the root of the project’s purpose of working directly with young people. Spanish and Portuguese citizens show similar levels of concern about online disinformation (7 out of 10 say they are concerned), but this concern falls among younger people. Younger people are also less interested in news, avoid news to a considerable extent and, in the case of Spain, trust news less than the general public, regardless of age (Novoa-Jaso et al., 2024).

Although in Portugal most citizens say they trust the news (53% (Cardoso et al., 2024)), both countries have seen increases in news saturation, selective exposure to news and active avoidance of news, particularly among younger people (Badillo-Matos et al., 2023). At the same time, there has been an increase and greater complexity in the phenomena of disinformation in the Iberian Peninsula, which, in constant evolution, becoming more complex in technological terms and more comprehensive in terms of their thematic approaches, fitting conveniently into the public debate by appealing to topics of greatest concern to citizens and voters, such as politics, armed conflicts, or climate change (Magallon-Rosa, 2024, Cardoso et al., 2024).

These trends are particularly worrying in the context of the rapid rise and institutionalisation of AI in the everyday media lives of online audiences. The impact of algorithmic structures and platforms on news consumption and the resulting perception of society and public life has been widely explored in recent years (Newman et al., 2023) and, more recently, academia has begun to focus its attention on AI and its effects on media diets, revealing an interesting trend: as observed in other regions, Iberian audiences are curious and willing to embrace this new technology but show substantially lower levels of trust in instances where it operates independently, without human supervision (Newman et al., 2025, Novoa-Jaso et al., 2024, Cardoso et al., 2024).

The effects of the phenomena and developments outlined above become particularly interesting and complex in the context of the emergence of a new technology, particularly one with such obvious disruptive potential as AI. There has been a proliferation of studies and efforts to predict and define the most likely future scenarios regarding the economic, cultural, technological and political effects of AI, and there has also been intense debate about its impact on democracy and public life.

The SmartVote project arises precisely in this context and at this crossroads of a debate that includes cultural, technological, political, and democratic aspects on how all these phenomena come together. Assuming that the complexity of these aspects precedes the emergence of AI in the form of Large Language Models (LLMs), it becomes even more necessary with their popularisation and widespread use. The experience of the last decade and the proliferation of algorithmic content selection mechanisms have sparked intense debates on the issues of algorithmic literacy and the informed use of information ecosystems.

Among these debates and within the connected public sphere, those dedicated to increasing selective exposure to content and information, and to the permeability of algorithmic environments to disinformation and manipulation of public opinion, stood out. Although the discussion about the effects of algorithms began long before that, it can be said that it reached the political mainstream between 2015 and 2016, with the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the American Presidential Elections that resulted in the election of Donald Trump to his first term (Badillo-Matos et al., 2023).

Although it is clear that, from a purely technological point of view, AI is seen as something unprecedented, from a political and communication point of view, the discussion about its impacts fits perfectly into the previous debate on algorithms, the effect of algorithms and the urgent need to promote media literacy training structures in order to include these new technological forms.

In the case of AI, and given the algorithmic forms that precede it, the aspects of hyper-personalisation of content produced in the image of what LLMs assume to be user expectations under the effect of potentially false neutrality are further accentuated. Like all communication structures throughout history, AI LLMs are not neutral, carrying with them messages intrinsic to the social and economic structures in which they emerged and, in many cases, reflecting the ideological parameters of those who created them (Buyl et al., 2024).

Indeed, looking at the recent history of the debate on media literacy and its growing importance in society, the training aspects of the SmartVote project related to these topics are in line with the generally accepted idea that the critical and informed use of technology is only possible if each user is aware of the systems of power and symbolism expressed in technology (Potter, 2004, Livingstone, 2003). At the same time, the added value of AI in terms of the systematic review and processing of information is undeniable, as it enhances the generation of relevant and reliable content, as well as the verification of information from other sources, a dimension that we also seek to explore within the scope of this project with the construction of AI tools that enable the identification and alerting of users to disinformation phenomena and content.

As systematically demonstrated in the aforementioned inaugural document of the project (Paisana et al., 2025), this work is particularly important among younger citizens of the Iberian Peninsula. Just as the mobilisation of young people helps to explain in part the rise of populist movements and parties, there is also data pointing to a greater propensity for activism around other causes such as gender equality, human rights or mental health. Working with young people in the crucial 18-25 age group is essential to foster good practices in political information and electoral participation because, regardless of political orientation, access to factual and informed information is a fundamental part of coexistence in a democracy and in democratic states governed by the rule of law.

In this compilation of articles, written by Iberian experts on the topics discussed above, we aim to explore all dimensions of the issues addressed by the SmartVote project. Thus, the following chapters are dedicated to the role of journalism, media literacy, new technological actors, and the role of technology in general in this debate.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Raul Magallón-Rosa for his comments and suggestions, which greatly contributed to the quality of this chapter.

References

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Note: This article is an automatic translation of the original text written in Portuguese. In case of any discrepancies or differences in meaning, the original version should be consulted.