I’m 18, and I didn’t learn how voting works in a classroom. Like most people my age, I learned about politics through TikTok, Instagram and whatever was trending the week of the election.
That’s not just a personal story, it’s a systemic issue. Today’s teens and young adults are forming political opinions and social identities in online spaces filled with emotional edits of candidates, 30-second “breaking news” clips with no policy context and commentary from influencers who confidently present opinion as fact. These platforms were never built to teach us how government works — they were built to keep us engaged.
As a political science student, youth crisis counselor and the founder of GenZVotes California Central Valley, I see how this information gap directly impacts young people’s emotional well-being, civic participation and sense of agency. We’re growing up in a world where content is curated before we’ve even had a chance to think for ourselves and the institutions that are supposed to teach us how to engage meaningfully are struggling to catch up.
At GenZVotes, we run voter education and media literacy workshops across California’s Central Valley, a region where youth voter turnout lags behind the state average by nearly 20 percentage points. When we ask high school and college students where they get their political information, the top answers are always the same: TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. When we ask if they trust what they see, the answers get a lot murkier.
“Every time I scroll, it feels like the world’s ending tomorrow, so why should I even bother?”
— Teen caller on crisis line
This uncertainty is real, and it’s growing. According to a Stanford study, nearly 70% of high school students couldn’t distinguish between legitimate news articles and sponsored content online. That’s not because they aren’t capable. It’s because they haven’t been taught how.
I’ve also seen the impact of that gap in my role as a counselor with a crisis line. Teens call in worried about climate change, frustrated with injustice or wondering if voting even matters. They’re taking in these huge political issues through an algorithm built to grab attention, not give context. One caller put it bluntly: “Every time I scroll, it feels like the world’s ending tomorrow, so why should I even bother?” Moments like that show how much algorithm-driven feeds don’t just shape what young people know about politics — they affect how they feel about their future.
What’s needed now is a cross-systems response: mental health, education and civic institutions working together to give young people the tools to think critically in a digital world that doesn’t reward reflection.
That starts with media literacy as a core part of youth development. We teach digital citizenship in some classrooms, but often only as a sideline. It can’t just live in schools. At GenZVotes, we integrate media literacy into voter registration drives and peer-to-peer workshops, helping students not only sign up to vote but also identify misinformation and understand how algorithms influence what they see. We’ve seen how powerful it is when teens hear from other teens about how to navigate their feeds.
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Other youth-led organizations are proving the same point. For example, Stanford’s Civic Online Reasoning project has developed classroom-ready tools that are also utilized by youth programs outside of school, teaching students how to evaluate sources using simple, research-backed strategies. The News Literacy Project, meanwhile, partners with community groups and afterschool programs to equip students with the skills to fact check and think critically. Together, these efforts demonstrate that media literacy isn’t just a “nice to have” — it’s a baseline civic skill that belongs in all spaces where young people learn and grow.
Courtesy of Brooklyn Senneway
Brooklyn Senneway
We also need to reform the way young people experience elections. For many first-time voters, the system feels outdated, binary and disconnected from the issues that matter to them. Ranked choice voting, now used in cities like New York and San Francisco, lets voters rank candidates in order of preference, rather than choosing just one. It encourages more civil discourse, supports diverse candidates and gives youth more meaningful options. In NYC’s first citywide use of the system, 88.3% of voters used the full ranking feature. That shows young voters can and will engage with complexity when we let them.
But reform won’t happen on its own. Youth have a critical role to play in pushing for election changes. They can testify at local council meetings, organize teach-ins on how ranked choice voting works or partner with coalitions already advocating for reform. Youth-led organizations like GenZVotes can help demystify the policy, create accessible explainers and amplify youth voices in the debate. Other groups, such as student government associations and statewide civic coalitions, can provide platforms for young people to speak directly with decision-makers. Reforming elections isn’t just about new rules on paper — it’s about equipping a generation to demand and design systems that reflect them.
This isn’t just about civic engagement, it’s about trust. Trust is a youth development principle that cuts across every system: education, mental health, child welfare and juvenile justice. If we want young people to feel a sense of ownership over their communities, they need to know that their voices matter. If we want them to be informed, we need to teach them how information works.
Young people are showing up, they just need to be shown how.
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Brooklyn Senneway is an 18-year-old crisis line counselor, political science student at Fordham University and founder of GenZVotes California Central Valley, a nonpartisan youth civic engagement initiative.
