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WU Political Review Young Activists: Fighting to Grow Up
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Ihad just gotten out of third period when my phone lit up with the notification I had been waiting for all day: my ACT score was available. It was raining hard outside, but I ran to my car across campus to open the email. With water dripping from my hair and hands shaking, I typed in my account password. It was my second try at the test, and I needed this score to be a win. It might sound silly, but when I saw my score, the one I was hoping for, I screamed loud enough to hurt my throat. I had worked hard for this, and it paid off. I rushed back into school to tell my teachers.
Months later, I found myself rushing to my car during the school day again. The scholarship program I applied to was releasing decisions at 2:00 P.M., and I wanted to be at home to open mine. The decisions were three hours late, so I sat at my computer and refreshed my screen every minute, waiting for a notification to pop up. When it finally did, my mom started crying before I could read the text. It was an acceptance letter. This time, I screamed loud enough to lose my voice.
When David Hogg, Parkland shooting survivor and gun control activist, announced his acceptance into Harvard, Twitter and major news sites were flooded with hate. A tweet from conservative political strategist Caleb Hull quickly went viral: “75% of Harvard students score over a 1470 on their SAT with the bottom 25% averaging just over 1400. You really need over a 1470 to be considered. David Hogg’s SAT score was 1270. He was denied to UCLA, UC San Diego, and UC Irvine, where a 1240 places you above average.”
Months before, TMZ had published Hogg’s test scores and GPA. They went viral, and many conservative voices on Twitter made fun of them. Throughout his application process, Fox News host Laura Ingraham mocked him when he was denied admission to a college. For weeks, David
Hogg’s notification screen was full of people mocking his test scores, his college rejections and acceptances, and his intelligence. He was eighteen at the time, and this was not long after he lost friends in the Stoneman Douglas shooting.
Young activists are so often put into the public spotlight as the leaders of movements. In the past five years, we have seen seventeenyear-old Greta Thunberg and nineteen-year-old Xiuhtezcatl Martinez forging paths to stop climate change, thirteen-year-old Mari Copeny fighting for clean water in Flint, twenty-year-old Emma González speaking at March for Our Lives protests, ten-year-old Bana Alabed advocating for peace in Syria, and so many more.
While doing amazing work that promotes peace, environmentalism, gun control, and racial justice, these activists are experiencing their formative years. They are growing up in the public eye, with conservative politicians, journalists, and even the president bullying them constantly. Usually, these politicians are not targeting the young activists’ policies to insult them. Rather, conservatives are targeting young activists’ personal lives—they are exploiting, bullying, and targeting children.
These personal attacks on activists’ personalities and apolitical lives stands in stark difference to the policy-oriented scrutiny directed towards their older counterparts. Conservative politicians already have an arsenal of insults to use against liberal activists, often involving their views and intelligence, but the young activist gives them one more thing to insult: age. These politicians see it as acceptable to put young activists in their place, as if they are children to be scolded and grounded at the dinner table for arguing with their parents.
Leslie Gibson, a former GOP candidate, said of Emma González: “There is nothing about this skinhead lesbian that impresses me and there is nothing that she has to say unless you're frothing at the mouth moonbat.” When Greta Thunberg was named Time’s 2019 Person of the Year, an honor Donald Trump reportedly pursued, he tweeted, “Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!”
Thunberg, sixteen at the time, responded by changing her Twitter bio: “A teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend.” In these situations, Thunberg has to add “gracefully subvert insults from the president” to her long daily schedule, already filled with climate change conferences, important meetings, and school.
Young activists cannot just let these comments go, especially when their audience wants a strong leader, but they also cannot respond with anger, which will be written off as a kid’s temper tantrum and will further the dialogue questioning their place in politics.
Now that young women are increasingly heard in the political sphere, Trump has more opportunity to target them and, in turn, influence the self-image of millions of girls across the nation. His commentary about women’s bodies has already made a lasting impact on young girls. In a New York Times poll just before the 2016 election, almost half of fourteen to
seventeen-year-old girls responding said that Trump’s comments about women have affected the way they think about their bodies.
For famous young activists, the mean girls in high school are millionaire corporate moguls, and these moguls are now becoming major influences even in the lives of girls outside of the public eye.
The focus on girls here is interesting. David Hogg aside, conservatives usually target female activists. It is not surprising that girls are questioned and insulted more than boys, as we have already seen how women are treated in politics. However, it is jarring that the extremely personal sexist comments are extended to children, especially when women are major sources of the scrutiny.
Women conservatives affront girl activists with the same misogynistic insults that they have experienced in their male-dominated field. Referencing Greta Thunberg and her counterparts, Laura Ingraham said, “The adults who’ve brainwashed these kids should be brought up on charges of child abuse.” Tomi Lahren, Ainsley Earhardt, and Amy Kremer are also among the many women conservatives scrutinizing young women like Thunberg.
This degradation is even worse for young activists of color, who are excluded from mainstream media entirely, despite their efforts. In January, Vanessa Nakate, a young Ugandan climate activist, was cropped out of a published photo featuring Greta Thunberg and fellow activists Isabelle Axelsson, Loukina Tille, and Luisa Neubauer.
While young white activists are scrutinized, young activists of color are completely erased from the narrative. It is not often that an activist of color breaks the white narrative promoted by the media, which is why it is important to publicly support activists like Vanessa Nakate, Feliquan Charlemagne, Anya Sastry, and their counterparts.
This erasure and criticism is, unsurprisingly, not given to young conservative activists. According to conservative politicians, when liberal activists speak up, they have been brainwashed, but when young conservatives voice their opinions, they are faces of the future.
Young Republicans like Breann Bates, Kassy Dillon, and Joshua DeFord have been consistently praised by conservative news outlets— their age is only mentioned as a hope for the future. Even young conservatives seen as the faces of large controversies are praised by older Republicans.
After the January 2019 Lincoln Memorial confrontation, a viral conflict between Native American activist Nathan Phillips and disruptive Covington Catholic High School students, Amy Kremer tweeted, “Honest to God, if Democrats didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all. Just look at treatment of Covington kids versus treatment of Gretchen [Thunberg].”
Here, we see a major conservative influencer standing up for young conservatives while critiquing young liberals. Kremer, a longtime Trump supporter, would likely question Thunberg’s age, but openly supports the Covington students.
These dynamics are terrifying. Conservative politicians are openly mocking young liberal activists about their personalities, appearances, and ages, while praising young conservatives without mentioning age.
It seems that age has become yet another weapon to yield against people trying to promote gun control, climate change activism, and human rights. In addition, youth has become an added target on the backs of women.
Young girls are scrutinized even by women and are torn apart by older men, and this public mistreatment of girl activists is influencing the self-image of girls across the world, who now have to worry about politicians targeting their bodies, intelligence, personalities, and ages, in addition to their beliefs.
The field of politics has always been marketed as an adult world, but now more than ever, young people are being hurt by the adults meant to protect us. Politicians repeatedly ignore or push aside climate change, gun control, racial injustice, water crises, and all the other major problems that young people will now have to deal with in the future. Because those adults aren’t doing their jobs, young activists are stepping up to save the world before it is irreversibly damaged.
Conservative politicians are telling us to grow up before we speak up, while simultaneously pushing to arm teachers in our classrooms, funding fossil fuels, and silencing young and minority voices. They are telling us to grow up while destroying our chances of doing so without fighting for it.
Hannah Grimes ‘23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at hannahgrimes@ wustl.edu.
WU Political Review Our Triggered Youth
Meyme Nakash
I—like many students who were home over fall break—went to the mall. My sister and I spent a day at the mall because we were on a very specific mission: to find our mom a birthday gift. After an hour or so of no luck, we decided to split our efforts and go to different department stores.
I barely stepped into the store when I heard a swift shuffling of feet in the distance. I chose to ignore it. I then proceeded to ask the salesman, standing at the front, a question that I cannot seem to remember because of the call I got from my sister that interrupted it. I raised my phone to my ear only to hear my sister scream, “GET OUT OF THE MALL. THERE’S A SHOOTER.” Immediately, my fight or flight instincts kicked in. My response: flight.
Within minutes, I managed to run far away from the mall across large, busy streets to a fast-food chain restaurant. I alerted the manager of the restaurant about the scene I’d just fled, and he almost immediately reached for his cellphone to call his brother who works at a store in the mall. I remembered my sister, and then my eyes flooded with tears.
I have never felt so helpless and terrified than in those few moments when I waited for my sister to pick up my phone call; when she answered, she could only muster sobs in between telling me that she “saw blood.” I told her to leave the mall and go to a pharmacy. Thankfully, we both safely escaped before the mall went into lockdown.
Later that day, we sat with our eyes glued to the television, waiting for our nearby news station to fill us in on what had happened earlier that day. Finally, a police investigator showed up on the screen and reported that the shooting was a false alarm, triggered by “balloon popping,” leading to a mass exodus from the mall from which several individuals had sustained injuries. My sister and I were floored.
When the news had spread about the false alarm, many of my friends and family members were relieved. I, however, could not say the same
for myself. No matter what the circumstances turned out to be, I experienced a potentially lifeor-death situation.
To this day, I think what baffles me the most about the false-alarm shooting at my mall is that I live in a red state that historically opposes strict gun laws.
More than ever, Americans are on edge after the string of mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio. Today, 59% of Americans say random acts of violence like mass shootings pose the biggest threat to them and 78% of Americans believe a similar attack will likely follow in the next three months, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted after these backto-back shootings. Statistics aside, after experiencing the “shooting” at my mall, it is clear to me that the fear of being next is a prevalent thought among Americans—especially among youth.
Whether it is a young person pulling the trigger, or a young person having their life taken away from them by another, the impact of gun violence falls disproportionately on our youth. A Center for American Progress study found that 54% of people murdered with guns in 2010 were under the age of 30. It also found that every 70 minutes an American under the age of 25 dies by gunfire. Yet despite the heavy burden of gun violence falling disproportionately among young people, few public health research dollars go towards understanding this epidemic and trying to solve it. Though we may have renewed public attention towards gun violence since the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, we still have a long way to go. What’s holding us back?
Generally speaking, our leaders do not bear the same personal connection to gun violence as us younger people. We are the generation that grew up terrorized by the news of family members or friends who were victims of mass shootings. We are the generation that sacrificed class time to practice lockdown drills. We are the generation that is so quick to assume that the noise of a balloon popping is a gunshot.
We—the American youth—deserve better than this. While I believe that our generation of leaders will address the issue of gun violence more actively, we should not have to wait. It’s time to put our political identities aside, and demand that serious action be taken to ensure that the American youth’s future does not unfold the way that current trends predict.
Meyme Nakash ’23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at mnakash@wustl. edu.
Artwork by Caroline Weinstein
Digital Dangers: Sharenting and Beyond
Salil Uttarwar, staff writer
You open your Facebook newsfeed and mindlessly scroll. You browse news from your favorite sports teams and pictures of cute dogs, but soon you notice that everywhere you look, you see parents posting about their kids. As a new parent, you are confused and slightly worried. Will other parents judge you if you don’t share photos and stories about your children? Are you parenting correctly if you’re the only one not “sharenting”?
As the popularity of social media has grown throughout the last decade, the phenomenon of “sharenting” has grown with it. Sharenting refers to the recent trend of parents overusing social media platforms to share information about their kids, such as baby photos and news about their activities and whereabouts. Parents tend to share only the cutest pictures, funniest stories, and most impressive accomplishments of their children. The problems of sharenting, however, extend beyond comparison and expectations of perfection for children. Parents frequently engage in sharenting without the consent of their children and create an easily accessible and replicable digital footprint that can permanently damage a child.
Although parents often teach their children that the internet is a dangerous place and to not reveal their information online, those who post about their kids on public platforms are inadvertently revealing details about their children that can harm them. A study by the Australian government’s eSafety Commission revealed that around 50% of all images circulated on pedophilic networks were originally taken from social media sites. Along with this, children are a common victim of identity theft. Barclays, an investment bank based in Britain, has estimated that sharenting will result in over $879 million worth of data losses and be the primary cause of over two thirds of identity fraud facing youth by 2030. Parents often share their children's birth dates, full names, and school addresses in their posts, along with seemingly irrelevant information such as their mother’s maiden name and names of pets, which can be used to answer security questions. Sharenting also can leave digital footprints that can be accessed in the future. For example, sensitive information such as diagnosis of mental or physical diseases and adoption status have the potential to lead to bullying in the future. Children are becoming increasingly connected on social media platforms with each other, and with their friends’ parents. All it would take to find and share such information is a simple scroll through someone’s profile.
Despite the implementation of measures to protect the privacy of children online, such as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), they cannot protect any information revealed through sharenting. COPPA, for example, prohibits websites from using children's data without parental consent, which is assumed when parents post on social media; implications for consent are buried in pages of privacy policies that are rarely ever read. Parental consent is clearly not the best way to gauge child consent, but since it is given on behalf of children, it is not feasible to create a legal framework that prevents dangerous oversharing. A realistic way to keep people safe would involve mandatory education of the dangers of social media. If social media websites were required to include compulsory education about the risks of posting online on their platforms, inadvertently risky sharing could be reduced. Even with such changes, the onus would still be on parents to understand the permanence and publicity of digital posts.
The dangers of social media, though, are not limited to children. Though seemingly consisting of thousands of fleeting posts and pictures, social media has a digital permanence that cannot be understated. Every post, picture, or tweet contributes to a digital identity followed by social media companies, external corporations that scrape data, or even online users that screenshot posts. Anything that is posted online is accessible, whether through middlemen that are your Facebook friends or Instagram followers or directly to the public. Because of this, people should do their best to limit access to their posts to people that they trust by making their social media accounts and posts as private as possible. Alternatively, secure platforms of information sharing such as group chats or Google photo albums should be considered. Though children are more frequently targets of stalking, data theft, and identity theft, nobody is safe from such threats. The safest assumption to make is that anyone can access the information you post online.
Many precautions must be taken before posting online, but especially about children. People should reflect on whether the post could potentially harm or embarrass themselves or their children in the future and always act with prudence. Sharing information about one’s children, and oneself, can be a healthy and fun way to connect with others, but in today’s digital world, it is of the utmost importance that sharing is done in moderation and with proper precaution.
Salil Uttarwar ‘21 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at suttarwar@wustl. edu.
Artwork by Arushee Agrawal, staff artist
Boomers’ Biggest Fear on Climate: Our Sincerity
Elena Murray, staff writer
In a coming-together of the world’s political and business leaders, the most recent World Economic Forum focused on climate change and sustainability, topics which not all attendees considered worthwhile to discuss.
Although 17-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg called for adherence to commitments made under the Paris Agreement, condemned the elites’ pattern of empty promises to reform, and demanded immediate climate action, her speech came after President Trump’s denunciation of climate activism as “alarmist” and “radical.” By urging the rejection of “perennial prophets of doom,” Trump made clear his skepticism toward the threat posed by climate change, emphasizing instead the strength of the American economy and its status as the number one exporter of oil and natural gas.
President Trump and Greta Thunberg have a history of antagonism, as seen in their December Twitter exchange in which the president claimed Thunberg should watch “a good old fashioned movie with a friend” in order to “work on her anger management problem.” In response, Thunberg then changed her Twitter biography to mockingly mimic the president’s complaint. The two did not clash outright at the forum; instead, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin dismissively commented on Thunberg’s lack of expertise, saying, “after she goes and studies economics at college, she can come back and explain to us.”
As anyone who has taken introductory economics would know, however, the cost of pollution and climate change is not accounted for by businesses unless an external force like the government compels them to consider it. There is no disincentive for businesses to produce environmentally-harmful products, not while such products remain profitable, unless governmental action is taken to make those goods more costly to produce. In other words, if the government doesn’t force businesses to adhere to environmental regulations, then no one will. Thunberg is right, and most economists agree with her.
Mnuchin’s commentary is indicative of the Trump administration’s contemptuous attitude toward climate change and follows a more widespread pattern in which the older generation scoffs at the younger, emanating signals which proclaim you’re too young to be here and why don’t we leave this to the real adults, sweetie. But while intergenerational spats are certainly nothing new and those in power frequently sneer at others who would claim to do their job more effectively, the disdain toward the younger generation’s climate activism is nearly always forcefully harsh. The boomers probably know they created and escalated the climate crisis, and don’t want to admit it. The politicians probably shy away from implementing policies that don’t market well to their base, caring more about re-election than pursuing the morally required solution to a crisis that’s already arrived.
Also probable is that fear permeates the hearts of those wealthy businessmen and politicians— fear at the outright sincerity with which the young organize in response to climate change. The vast majority of us aren’t marching in a vain attempt to go viral or as a self-absorbed excuse to post on social media. We don’t demand change in order to advance our careers or make money. We protest because we are truly angry and afraid. We’ve inherited this completely unsolved existential threat everyone’s known about for decades, while those in power did nothing to stop it and even contributed to it. Despite our action, our voting, our undeniable expression within the democratic system, the same complacent, money-corrupted dirtbags remain in power. It’s not a small thing, what we ask for—we know that. But here’s one you may have heard before, boomers: you can’t write this essay the night before it’s due. And you’ve known about this one for a long time.
Mnuchin’s comments toward Thunberg exemplify the position politicians take on problems they don’t want to take responsibility for solving. The issue’s more complicated than it seems. It’ll take years—not worth our precious time. The irony becomes obvious when other topics supposedly have plain-and-simple solutions, only prevented from realization by the stonewalling of the other side. Policy is simple, except when you don’t want to do it. Then it becomes too complicated for the average citizen to understand, much less for a 17-year-old girl to lecture world leaders about.
This is not to claim all political problems possess clear and obvious solutions. But the climate crisis is one area in which the expert opinion points to the clearest consensus science can provide. The effects of climate change are here. There will be irreversible environmental damage if the 1.5 degree threshold is surpassed. And governmental intervention is the only way to effectively enforce environmental regulations. It doesn’t take an economics degree to see that.
The urgent sincerity of the young’s voice on climate change is the necessary reflection of the situation’s direness. In the words of Greta Thunberg, “We don’t want these things done by 2050, 2030 or even 2021. We want this done now.”
Elena Murray ‘22 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at elenamurray@wustl. edu.
Social Media and Youth Activism
Malar Muthukumar
The recent surge of youth-led social movements has led many to claim that youth activism is on the rise. Looking at history, it is clear that young people have often been on the forefront of social change. We can see examples of youth activism in the US by looking back to the 1960s. Students were an important part of the Civil Rights Movement, making their voices heard by organizing into groups such as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and by protesting racism through demonstrative actions such as the sit-ins at the Greensboro Café. Students were also at the forefront of the antiwar movement protesting the Vietnam War. These people are now immortalized in history curricula across the country. So, while young people have always had an important voice and been catalysts for social change, the digital age has given us a new powerful tool that has changed the way we approach activism: social media.
Activist Greta Thunberg has had a massive impact on the fight against climate change. Named Time’s Person of the Year, her popularity is indisputable. Thunberg has set herself apart in the climate change movement in that her activism is mostly driven by social media. Her rise to fame began when images of her protesting alone outside of the Swedish Parliament went viral. Later, as she became the face of the climate movement, her frank, to-the-point speaking style combined with her meme-worthy facial expressions caused her to have many other viral moments (for example, the image of her glaring at President Trump at the UN climate summit as
Young people have always been an important voice and catalyst for social change. However, the digital age has given us a new, powerful tool that has changed the way we approach activism: social media.
well as her fiery criticism of world leaders during her speech). Being a member of Generation Z, Thunberg has grown up with social media, and she knows how to use it effectively. Thunberg has been attacked publicly by many world leaders, but she always claps back in a way that makes her response get more attention from the media than the initial insult. She simply changes her Twitter bio.
The example of Greta Thunberg and her leadership in the Global Climate Strike, as well as other large-scale movements such as the March for Our Lives and the Women’s March, would seem to suggest that social media has been incredibly beneficial to social movements because it allows them to disseminate their message to so many more people and coordinate events on national or even global scales.
There are some who believe that social media is not changing activism for the better. The criticism mostly is against those who participate in what has been termed “slacktivism,” which is when people post on social media about issues but do not make the extra effort of protesting in person. However, the argument that social media is somehow lowering people’s incentive to protest in person seems flawed, especially in light of recent global and national movements that have only been possible because of social media. Actually, social media allows small groups to organize large numbers of people in a way that commands the attention of the news media and politicians.
Social media is particularly important for marginalized groups. According to a Pew Research poll, “Certain groups of social media users—most notably, those who are black or Hispanic—view these platforms as an especially important tool for their own political engagement. For example, roughly half of black social media users say these platforms are at least somewhat personally important to them as a venue for expressing their political views or for getting involved with issues that are important to them. Those shares fall to around a third among white social media users.” The ability of social media to amplify an individual’s voice is empowering, and it is a place where the forces that silence people in everyday life do not apply. Also, I do not agree with the idea that only in-person protests are effective at creating change. While protests and strikes have their purpose, the social media post is an effective and impactful form of activism in and of itself. A political post from a celebrity, or even a 2:00 A.M. tweet from our president, is always considered interesting and newsworthy.
Social media has fundamentally changed the way activism is being conducted in the modern age. Young people are at the forefront of that change, having grown up with the technology and having the skill to use it effectively. Social media will continue to inspire large-scale movements across the globe. At present, politicians are forced to respond at least verbally to these movements when they occur, but it remains to be seen whether those words will be translated into concrete policy action.
Malar Muthukumar ‘23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at malar.muthukumar@wustl.edu.
Nkemjika Emenike Design by Jinny Park, assistant design director
Crumpled papers thrown into trashcans located in Awkward middle school classrooms Or noisy cafeterias Or anywhere you go, and every time you do it All while we shout his name At eighteen years With the number 8 stitched in purple The youngest person to ever start an NBA game And one year later The youngest to be on an All-Star team Age is a funny thing You get praised for doing it young Winning and succeeding and living your dream Doing it while you’re young But the praise takes a solemn tone when it comes in the form of eulogy If one asked you when you thought you would die
I doubt many of us would give the answer forty-one years old And I guess if we were given the choice If we knew We’d be more prepared for people to leave us
When I think of age I think of milestones. For me, eighteen was the year that marked when I could vote in political elections. The twenty-first birthday is filled to the brim with champagne and late-night mistakes. Thirty is when it becomes socially acceptable to have your first mid-life crisis. And sixty-five is when tickets to the movies become cheap again. For Kobe Bryant, it seemed like every age brought something greater than the age before it and something different than what that age would bring for most Americans. While most of us at eighteen were starting our first years of college or taking gap years, Kobe stepped into the realm of professional basketball playing for the Los Angeles Lakers.
As someone from Los Angeles, a city that had already suffered the loss of local legend Nipsey Hussle in 2019, the pain that tore through me and my fellow Los Angeles natives was unspeakable when we lost Kobe Bryant. At age thirty most of us will have just started in our careers; Kobe Bryant was at the height of his. At age sixty-five many of us will be retired, travelling, spending time with family and grandkids; Kobe Bryant will never have that chance. He did everything right; he worked hard, was a good father, and stood by our city and team.
He served as a role model for so many black boys and girls by serving as the epitome of success for black America. Kobe symbolized pride, confidence, determination—proving wrong time and time again anyone who doubted him. The importance of Kobe Bryant’s presence in black culture, American culture, and the basketball community was and continues to be immense.
But there are no words to describe the importance of his presence to his family, to his wife and to his daughters. His retirement from the NBA in 2016 was sad for the city, but he had done so much for Los Angeles that it wasn’t the type of sadness that was tinged with anger aimed at the fact that Kobe wasn’t going to play anymore. Rather, it was a sadness based on how much we were going to miss watching him play, coupled with a gratefulness that we got to see him play for as long as we did.
The impact that Kobe Bryant has had on not just the basketball community, but the entire world, is remarkable. There is currently a petition going around to change the NBA logo to a silhouette of Kobe Bryant. There is increasing demand for all NBA teams to retire the numbers 8 and 24 as a form of respect for Kobe’s legacy. The outpouring of love from other basketball players, fans, and America as a whole is truly telling of the man that Kobe Bryant was, and the memory of him that will persist in years to come. Kobe Bryant’s life was cut too short, in a way that words still cannot describe. As I and many others try to grapple with the reality of his passing, I keep my thoughts with those who loved him dearly and can no longer hold him close. He died twenty-six days into the new decade And suddenly the world stopped turning I thought it was a hoax I think most of us did Or at least
Most of us hoped Age is a funny thing When you’re constantly told to not rush To take your time in life When it's moments like these that serve to remind you that life isn’t that long at all But To have accomplished so much To have touched as many people To have inspired a generation To have lifted a city To have impacted a culture To have shaken a nation All at the age of forty-one years old Is a truly ageless life
Nkemjika Emenike '23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at nemenike@wustl.edu.
WU Political Review TikTok Takeover
Sophia Conroy
“T ikTok is the first thing that’s actually made me feel old,” a friend recently said to me, and I couldn’t help but agree. In the two years since its release, Tik Tok has become a viral sensation. It was the thirdmost downloaded app of 2019, surpassing Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat. Vox called it “the defining social media app of Gen Z.” The app has been downloaded over 1.5 billion times worldwide, and at least 122 million times in the US. Given its rapid rise to fame, many wonder whether TikTok will replace other platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. Could a never-ending stream of one-minute video clips become the future of social media?
With the emergence of new apps and technology, social media use has shifted remarkably from one generation to the next. Not only do different generations vary in their usage of social media, but there is also a discrepancy among which platforms they access. For example, 96% of “Baby Boomers,” ages 56 to 74, use Facebook at least once a week, compared to only 36% of Generation Z, those born after 1995. One explanation is the emergence of new platforms that are more accessible to teens. In 2016, Snapchat surpassed Facebook as the most popular social network among US teens and it is predicted to grow among the 12 to 17 year-old demographic while Facebook continues to lose the teenage audience. As one article explains, “When Millennials were teenagers, social media was a place to check out what their friends were up to and update their status, for Gen Z, social media is a place for entertainment.” And if entertainment is what the younger generation is looking for, apps like Snapchat, Instagram, Youtube, and
Could a never-ending stream of one-minute video clips become the future of social media? It sounds like a bad dystopian novel: an endless stream of videos potentially being censored by the Chinese government and disseminated among the generation of the future.
TikTok are where to find it.
Because of this generational shift towards entertainment, it makes perfect sense that TikTok has been so successful among Gen Z—teens were their target audience all along. Everything about the platform caters to the entertainment-obsessed generation, intentionally pulling them in and making it easy to spend hours on the app. The home page of the app, “For You,” is an infinite, algorithm-based feed of video clips based on viewing history. This page eliminates the need to follow other people—instead, TikTok chooses content for you, and you’ll probably like it. Unlike Facebook and Instagram, and even Vine, on which you selectively follow people, Tik Tok is simple. It asks nothing of the user. In the words of Ankur Thakkar, the former editorial lead at Vine, “Apparently [to get people to engage] you just … show them things, and let a powerful artificial intelligence take notes.” Furthermore, the “For You” page is unlimited. To quote a recent New York Times article, “Stimulation is constant…The pool of content is enormous. Most of it is meaningless.”
But it’s possible that meaningful content, when it is produced, is being hidden from feeds or even deleted. The concerning truth is that TikTok, the social media of the future, has a censoring problem. In September, The Guardian published TikTok’s internal company guidelines instructing moderators to “ban videos and topics in line with Chinese-government censorship policies. This censorship is visible— for example, a search for #HongKongProtests on Twitter brings up an endless stream of results, while the same search on TikTok has only 9 posts. When called out for this discrepancy, TikTok justified the censorship by characterizing TikTok as “a place for entertainment, not politics,” and then outright denying that it censors political content. However, there is more evidence to the contrary. When seventeen year-old Feroza Aziz posted a clip criticizing China's persecution of Uygher Muslims in November, the app suspended her account in response. Furthermore, some of the content considered to be a violation of company guidelines is marked as “visible to self,” and limited in feeds but not outright deleted, making it impossible to know what how much content is being censored.
Given TikTok's influence as a growing social media platform, its policy of censorship has concerning ramifications. According to the Washington Post, “app experts believe it could grow into a formidable part of Americans’ online information food chain — much in the same way that Facebook, founded as an app for college students, transformed the arenas of news, politics and misinformation.” Could this app be, as the Washington Post suggests, “one of China’s most effective weapons in the global information war?” It sounds like a bad dystopian novel: an endless stream of videos potentially being censored by the Chinese government and disseminated to young people worldwide. But it’s real, and it’s here. What are we going to do about it?
Sophia Conroy ‘23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at s.conroy@wustl.edu.
