Social media platforms have become spaces of youth voice, participation, and connection. Research on expressive citizenship highlights how young people use networked media to articulate personal experiences and engage with public issues outside formal political arenas. Yet scholarship on context collapse and online visibility also shows that these platforms expose users to overlapping audiences, amplifying uncertainty, reputational vulnerability, and social sanction. Online participation thus unfolds alongside exposure to harassment, judgment, and relational harm. This raises a critical question: how is participation sustained when visibility itself becomes risky? This paper introduces "visibility reconfiguration" to examine how youth redistribute expressive practices across public, semi-public, and private online spaces under heightened risk. The diagnostic case of Cambodia is used, a rapidly digitising society where social media and messaging platforms have become infrastructural to everyday life and where relational and reputational risks are embedded in social interaction. Rather than asking whether young people are disengaging from online expression, the paper shifts attention to where expression is redirected when public posting is perceived as risky, and whether changes in public visibility reflect withdrawal, strategic relocation, or other forms of reorganisation. The study combines an online survey of youth aged 18-24 with in-depth interviews centred on posting decisions and experiences of vulnerability. By foregrounding visibility reconfiguration, the paper challenges the assumption that reduced public posting signals silence, showing instead how participation persists through less visible, but no less meaningful, communicative practices.

Authors:
Marc Pinol Rovira, American University of Phnom Penh, Cambodia

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Marc Pinol Rovira is Assistant Professor at the American University of Phnom Penh. His research focuses on digital governance and civic expression in Southeast Asia. He is currently studying youth visibility and social media use in Cambodia.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcpinol99/

See this presentation on the full schedule – Monday Schedule

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