Young people face vast exclusions from formal political processes due to deep-seatedmyths about their innocence and attending lack of political will. As the participatorypolitics tradition suggests, social media provides opportunities for youth to circumventthese exclusions and renegotiate political power. In particular, social media enablesyoung people to participate in public discourses, which I contend is comparable toparticipating in political processes, in that it plays a major role in shaping politics andhow they are related to. Crucially, social media also allows those participating in thesediscourses to forge networked connections with each other, paving the way for vitalcoalition building. At the same time, these opportunities are hindered by institutionalpowers that, whether intentionally or not, reinforce the status quo of youth politicalexclusion through tactics ranging from dismissal to demonization. An ongoing panicover youth and social media is arguably the most extreme version of this, as it seeksto cast social media as an intrinsic danger to youth and restrict their access to itentirely. Yet, the panic also implicitly confirms the political potential of online youthby treating it as a threat. Ultimately, the panic both reflects and exacerbates adynamic of agitation and control between online youth and institutionally-backedpowers. Although it is common for new media to embody this dynamic, socialmedia influences the current iteration in distinct ways. In this dissertation, I takean empirical approach to examining how youth leverage social media to challengeinstitutional power, and how institutional power attempts to reassert itself, consideringa variety of institutional actors and platform contexts. Through this exploration,I aim to illuminate social media’s political capacities, uplift youth political agency,suggest strategies for better supporting it, and position the prevailing panic as anundue act of suppression.My first project looks at young people’s election speech on Twitter; I find thatwhile young people produce vibrant election discourse that meaningfully disruptsnorms of political debate, standard data collection tools used to research onlinediscursive participation tend to overlook it. This study highlights how researchers can unwittingly uphold harmful stories regarding youth political apathy, and invitesus to be skeptical when our tools fail to detect their participation. My second projectturns to youth activist circulation strategies on TikTok. Despite insistence on thenarrative that Gen Z adopts highly personalized forms of political communication,especially on TikTok, this work reveals a collectivist sensibility when promulgatingactivist messaging. It therefore urges researchers and other opinion leaders to look forsigns of collective action among young people, rather than undermining their powerby portraying them as individualistic. My final project deals with counternarrativeproduction on TikTok and the confrontation of hegemonic actors. I uncover howTikTok users engage platform features to construct compelling critiques and forgesolidarity networks in the process. Meanwhile, elite actors are quick to malign suchparticipation as insincere and/or the product of algorithmic manipulation, ultimatelycalling for censorship. This project implores those with decision-making power torespect youth political agency and listen to their grievances, rather than rush to shutit down.Together, these projects affirm social media’s capacity to support youth in buildingand renegotiating political power, while also giving way to novel forms of obstructionby institutionalized forces. As such, they help guide us toward a future in whichyouth political agency is embraced rather than suppressed in an increasingly digitizedworld.