Influences of Populism on Youth in Social Media

Abstract

In recent years, the global spread of COVID-19 has brought significant instability and uncertainty to the lives of people worldwide while also providing an opportunity to spread populist ideas. Especially in recent years, with the development of Internet technology, populism and the internet have fused to form a "cyber-populist" social trend. This online populism has a wide range of influence and destructive solid power, bringing a great crisis to global ideological security. At the same time, online populism is also insidiously attacking young people. It is mainly manifested in the birth of a destructive mentality among young people, inducing them to blindly follow the crowd, lose their independent personalities, and polarise their value judgments. This paper analyses typical public opinion events and their data in recent years by searching the internet and the Civiw website; in the light of the characteristics of youth expression in the Internet era, the negative impact of online populism on the psychological development of youth is explored. The paper goes on to discuss the reasons for the negative impact of online populism on the psyche of young people: inadequate mechanisms for monitoring online opinion at universities, insufficient protection of young people's awareness of the rule of law online, and a lack of online activism among young people. Only by promoting social justice from a macro perspective, controlling the gathering of online groups, using laws to channel public psychology and bringing online speech back to mainstream ideology is the only way to move the youth population from impulsiveness to rationality, and it is also the way to address the dangers posed by online populism.