Stop, collaborate and vote! Spotify encourages people to vote in the European elections

The “Play Your Part, Europe” campaign will inform all free and premium users aged 18 and over with an in-app message to remind them of the election cycle.

Europe will vote for its next parliament in elections from June 6 to 9 this year. The European elections have seen a recent increase in turnout following a 40-year downward trend, but youth voter turnout remains relatively underrepresented.

This has inspired new measures by some European countries to increase the youth vote. Belgium and Germany both lowered their voting age to 16, joining Malta and Austria. Greece also lowered the voting age to 17 before the last European elections.

Now, Spotify is trying to encourage young voters by reminding its European users to vote in the elections. The music streaming app also launched a playlist filled with European artists and offers links to the EU website in its messaging.

This isn’t the first time Spotify has run a voting campaign ahead of the election. The Swedish company recently issued a similar notification for local elections in the United Kingdom as well as elections in Sweden, the Netherlands and the United States.

Next June, around 365 million people will be able to vote in the European elections. But what will be the impact of social networks on European politics over the next five years?

The social media factor

As a music streaming platform, Spotify is able to run its campaign without worrying too much about partisan involvement. However, major social media platforms have come under increased scrutiny since the last round of elections in 2019.

As of 2019, TikTok is the fastest growing social media platform in Europe. Increased youth participation in recent elections was widely seen as a result of parliamentary campaigns run through platforms like Snapchat. TikTok, which benefits from a large Gen-Z audience, could therefore play an important role in the next elections.

President of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola posted videos on the app in an attempt to engage with young voters. She explained her choice to Euronews: “Four countries will vote at 16, one country will vote at 17. What I don’t want is for these young people to get their information potentially from propaganda or disinformation sources. So we said, let’s go ahead and get our message across, and hopefully once these kids go through the page they’ll get something that says, “ooh, I like this, I’m going to go vote.” “.

Although Metsola is not the only one using the platform politically, she stands out for her arrival on the algorithm a year after TikTok was banned from the work devices of European Parliament employees.

TikTok is at the center of concerns over social media cybersecurity in Europe. Both Commission and Parliament “strongly recommends” that lawmakers remove the platform from their personal devices.

Yet Metsola’s view on combating disinformation is shared by many other left-wing politicians in Europe. “If we really want to address also the very young, I think we cannot leave it to the far-right parties again to be on TikTok while we say, with a kind of arrogance, no, I doesn’t like TikTok,” Tilly said. Metz, a Luxembourg Green Party MEP told Euronews during an election debate.

TikTok, Meta and X have all been contracted by the European Commission to stress test their election guidelines on disinformation.

The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) provided guidelines for social media platforms with large user bases to understand their role and responsibilities in an election cycle. Platforms with more than 45 million users were invited to the workshop last month.

TikTok and Meta have already set up election centers to combat misinformation.