  From the urbanists' perspective, the everyday experience of young people, as
an underrepresented group in the design of public spaces, includes tactics they
use to challenge the strategies which rule over urban spaces. In this regard,
youth led social movements are a set of collective tactics which groups of
young people use to resist power structures. Social informational streams have
revolutionized the way youth organize and mobilize for social movements
throughout the world, especially in urban areas. However, just like public
spaces, these algorithm based platforms have been developed with a great power
imbalance between the developers and users which results in the creation of non
inclusive social informational streams for young activists. Social activism
grows agency and confidence in youth which is critical to their development.
This paper employs a youth centric lens, which is used in designing public
spaces, for designing algorithmic spaces that can improve bottom up youth led
movements. By reviewing the structure of these spaces and how young people
interact with these structures in the different cultural contexts of Iran and
the US, we propose a humanistic approach to designing social informational
streams which can enhance youth activism.
