Platformed Identities and Digital Civic Transformation: A Comparative Sociological Analysis of Youth Political Participation on TikTok and Instagram in South Korea and Germany

Abstract

This article examines how platform-specific communication structures shape youth political participation, identity negotiation, and socio-cultural transformation within digitally mediated societies. Drawing on a comparative sociological analysis of TikTok and Instagram among youth communities in South Korea and Germany, the study investigates how digital infrastructures interact with institutional cultures, communicative norms, and collective identity formation to produce distinct modes of civic engagement and social transformation. While existing scholarship has explored social media activism and digital participation, limited research comparatively analyzes how platform architectures and socio-political environments jointly mediate identity politics and civic practices across culturally differentiated democratic societies. Using a mixed-method comparative framework integrating digital ethnography, discourse analysis, institutional analysis, and secondary survey datasets from OECD, UNESCO, and national digital participation reports, the study demonstrates that digital participation is not merely technologically enabled but institutionally conditioned and culturally negotiated. The findings indicate that TikTok fosters emotionally accelerated and visually performative civic identities, whereas Instagram facilitates more curated and networked forms of symbolic political participation. Comparative evidence further shows that South Korean youth participation is shaped by hypercompetitive educational structures, compressed modernity, and 

digitally intensified collectivism, while German youth civic engagement reflects decentralized political culture, deliberative communication norms, and institutionalized digital literacy practices.

The article argues that platformed political participation constitutes a new form of communicative citizenship in which identity performance, algorithmic visibility, and institutional trust become interconnected mechanisms of social transformation. The study contributes to contemporary socio-cultural scholarship by developing a comparative framework linking digital communication structures, identity negotiation, and societal resilience within platformized democracies.