In this theoretical paper centered on adolescent literacy and civic engagement, we draw from human rights education and multimodal cosmopolitan critical literacy consider the ways adolescents may take up civic engagment. With a combination of multimodal resources and social networking, adolescents are able to have an impact on a variety of social and political issues including immigration, translanguaging, racism, bullying, and other community problems relevant to their lives. The purpose of this essay is to illuminate the many ways that adolescents can participate in local and global civic engagement through human rights education and multimodal critical cosmopolitan literacy, as well as critique current practices. The analysis uses a 3-level construct to selectively examine youth civic engagement. Results indicate that, while there is promising work being done to promote civic engagement from a justice-oriented stance, more work and research is needed to explore the affordances and challenges of global civic engagement as well as the possibilities of utilizing multimodal literacies and social networking to address social justice and human rights issues.