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Despite new affordances available since the mainstreaming of digital media in countries with high levels of internet connectivity, young actors in teenage years are a group whose involvement in social and political affairs remains constrained by prevailing stereotypes regarding the social role of youth and acceptable forms of civic engagement. This paper explores the discourse on youths' active citizenship found in Czech online media outlets, conceptualised as adult-governed spaces. Considering age as a significant exclusionary category in approaches to citizenship, the discursive construction of young active Czech citizens is studied on six concrete local actors and analysed via two types of relational positioning: (1) intra-generational (youth-to-youth) and (2) inter-generational (youth-to-adult). Media representations reveal normative expectations of youth as political actors that range from a refusal to recognise their participation to acclaiming them for it. Depending on the intersection of the actors' agendas, their personal profiles, and the political orientation of the media outlets, the media depict the actors either negatively as deviant or positively as exceptional, reflecting contemporary ideo-political conflicts in Czechia. The paper concludes that the young age of the actors serves as an amplification factor for discreditation of a counter-attitudinal political agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 2020, the Czech digital audience was confronted with a request to critically revise local history and the current official cultural and political attitudes from a decolonial perspective. A group of university students and lecturers published the Manifesto for Decolonization, a digitally circulated text that sparked a debate about what was/is the position of the former Czech lands and contemporary Czechia within the history of Western European colonization. This article examines three phases of the event: the publishing of the text, its digital audience reception, and the reflection of its production. As for publishing and reception, the imaginations inscribed into the text by its authors are examined in comparison with the imaginations present in the popular responses of digital audiences expressed on social media. To explore the context of production, we conducted and analyzed interviews with three local experts involved in the production process. Through our findings, we demonstrate the following: (1) the role of a generational gap that divides the views of local experts in interpreting the aspirations of the Manifesto and (2) the role of a polarized nature of online deliberation that drives the dismissive popular response and leads to the formation of an anti-discourse. We conclude that two symptoms—victimization of the Self and weaponization of Leftist labels—are especially salient in the response to the decolonization agenda in Czechia as a Central Eastern European, post-socialist country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]