Engaged but careless? The roles of online civic engagement, well-being, and information literacy in careless information sharing

Civically active people online are usually more prone to careless information sharing. Thus, although usually framed positively, the youth civic engagement can also result in the sharing of potentially harmful content. However, the evidence on underage social media users is limited. This paper focuses on two factors that can potentially influence online behavior: one through well-being, and the second through information navigation and processing digital literacy. A three-wave random intercept cross-lagged panel model was employed, and the analyses were conducted on adolescents (Mage = 14.3; N = 2660) from Estonia, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Portugal. The data was collected between Spring 2021 and Spring 2023. Between-person associations between online civic engagement and well-being, and between online civic engagement and information navigation and processing literacy, were supported. This means more engaged adolescents are also more dissatisfied and have higher digital literacy, corroborating the existing literature. There were only limited within-person associations between careless sharing and information navigation and processing literacy; however, none of them supported the proposed associations.