Soros’s soldiers, slackers, and pioneers with no expertise? Discursive exclusion of environmental youth activists from the digital public sphere in Hungary and Czechia

Our paper fills the gap in research on online public representations of politically active youth by focusing on the discursive representations of Fridays for Future, a youth-led climate movement, in user generated content in Czechia and Hungary. By employing the childism approach, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of the exclusion of youth from the public sphere. Our qualitative analysis identified two exclusionary strategies: 1) normative roles attributed to youth; 2) labeling youth for allegedly holding aberrant values. We stress both similarities and differences in the two countries of Central and Eastern Europe, reflecting this region’s historico-political features.