Social Media, Digital Literacy, and Youth Civic Engagement in Indonesia: An Integrative Review

Abstract

This integrative review examined how social media use and digital literacy relate to civic engagement among young people (aged roughly 16–30 years) in Indonesia. Scholarly publications and institutional documents published mainly between 2016 and 2026 were identified through purposive searches of scholarly databases and institutional repositories, and were retained if they addressed social media, digital literacy, or civic engagement, concerned young people, and had implications for education, citizenship, or participation. The final corpus comprised 17 sources (6 Indonesia-specific and 11 international); no formal quality appraisal was conducted, and the number of records screened was not recorded. Thematic synthesis yielded four themes: access and participation, information evaluation, civic expression, and collective action. The largely descriptive evidence suggests that social media widens opportunities for young people to encounter public issues, express opinions, and join networked campaigns, but online participation was not shown to become meaningful civic engagement automatically, because algorithmic visibility, unequal access and skills, misinformation, and polarization can limit its civic value. The review proposes, as the authors' conceptual synthesis and not a tested model, that digital literacy links access to informed participation and that schools, families, civil society organizations, public institutions, and platforms share responsibility for digital citizenship. The conclusions are interpretive and need empirical testing in Indonesian communities.