Endless Thread - Gen Z wants you to take political action, one TikTok at a time

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

Gen Z is over it. The youngest generation of adults is inheriting a climate crisis, the ongoing fallout from a global pandemic, a polarized political landscape, and a tenuous economic reality.  And many Gen Z members, a generation more likely to identify as progressive than conservative, are ready for something to give. Enter: Gen Z for Change — a youth-led non-profit that brands itself as, "the place where the creator economy and progressive politics intersect on social media." The group leverages a hundreds-deep network of social media creators to spread calls to action over TikTok. They've also pulled on the programming expertise within their team to develop a caché of semi-automatic tools that take the guesswork out of engaging with their political agenda. Their latest tool, "Ceasefire Now!!" takes these efforts one step further — resulting in, by Gen Z for Change's count, two million emails calling for a ceasefire in Gaza hitting the inboxes of elected representatives in Washington every day. Show notes:  Gen Z for Change website Is Gen Z Switching Political Direction? Not So Fast. (PRRI, 2024) Gen Z for Change's Latest Action Sparked a Shift in How Yelp Handles Anti-Abortion Crisis Pregnancy Centers (Teen Vogue, 2022) Kellogg says it will permanently replace striking employees (NPR, 2021)

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Producer Caitlin Harrop, bringer of tunnel girl stories, purveyor of accounts we don't yet know of. You are back on the TikTok beat. Yes, I am. And what, pray tell, have you brought endless thread today? Today, I bring you a story

of political influence, online hijinks, of mass mobilization. And it's all from a place then where I spend a lot of time. You do not. And that would be, should we say it together, TikTok. That's right. But it's not at all in the way you might expect. I like this way of describing it because there is some mischief in this story,

but there's also some good old fashion right into your congressperson to get them to better represent you. And in this story, these two efforts are kind of connected. Yeah, they are. And one sort of in many ways leads to the other. And to tell this story, we should begin by telling you about Sean Wiggs. Sean Wiggs is a guy who's always loved a puzzle. I've always been interested in like computers and technology and like kind of like puzzles in general. So taking things apart, putting things together. And so my parents kind of latched on to that. When Sean was 15, his parents bought him all the components to build his first computer, which he immediately did. He built his own computer and he loved it.

So when I went to college and decided what I wanted to do, it was very easy to say I want to be like in engineering or in computer science or in that field. But it wasn't until the pandemic that Sean at the age of 20 got beyond the general idea of computer science and was galvanized to focus on coding. He was like, Well, if we're stuck inside, I want to pick up a new skill, and the skill that I wanted to pick up was programming. So I went on Google, looked up how to code, and just kind of worked myself through a couple of different applications and a couple of small projects. Sean starts off with a couple of coding projects every computer coder starts with.

Did you do a hello world? Did you start there? I did. Nice. But with everything happening during the pandemic, Sean is drawn to use his coding powers for political action. That's when Black Lives Matter was kind of like popping off very much. I was in summer of 2020. And so I was pretty involved. Fired up, Sean takes to TikTok under the name Sean Black.

Giving what I believe was, you know, good commentary about BLM and police and the change that I wanted to see in the world. While the nation fights a global pandemic and yet another reckoning with racism and police brutality, something else is simmering in Texas. Texas Right to Life has created a whistleblower website to help enforce the Texas heartbeat bill that Governor Greg Abbott signed into law this past May. It's 2021. That group, Texas Right to Life, which is a leading voice in helping to pass some of the state's most restrictive abortion legislation, has created a website where individuals can anonymously report

anyone they say has violated state abortion laws. It was very, like, draconian. Pro-choice advocates take to take to take to take to talk. TikTok to encourage people to flood the whistleblower site with fake information. The goal is to make it harder for Texas officials to sift through tips to find information on real people. Sean, who likes putting things together and taking them apart, sees this campaign as an opportunity. And I was like, oh, well, I've been learning how to program for the last year and a half, and I'm on TikTok doing political stuff. So what if I just use my skills in both, put it together

in one project, and make a bot? that did that automatically. Think about it this way. When you go to this whistleblower website to report people for trying to give reproductive health care, you have to fill out a form. And that form has fields. Sean's plan make it so that someone can do all of that

very easily with fake information. In fact, they're not even really doing it. They're taking a simple action, and their internet browser is doing it for them. Sean posts a video sharing the tool on TikTok. They hear me out, right? What if somebody, very technical, very handsome, set up a bot that automatically sent the request to their website?

Oh, wait, it was me. I did that. It's right here. The video takes off. This is kind of what people call activism, you know? They're trying to use the internet against us. People who were raised on the internet. This was like my first time doing browser automation. So it took me, like maybe like a webinism.

week just to get something working. And then Sean took it one step further. And then I started thinking, what if I made this a bit easier for everybody? So I'm an iOS shortcut. You might be asking yourself, what does the iOS shortcut do? Well, it picks a random city, county, and Texas zip code, and all the other information. Put it in the form, automatically submit. And the crowd goes wild.

The response was absolutely insane for somebody who had like 10,000 followers on TikTok. The reaction was extremely positive. And so my video hit like half a million, 750,000 views, a million views. The response is so positive that Sean starts to think, hey, maybe I can reproduce some of this for other causes. Like in response to what Kellogg got up to during union employee strikes in December of 2021. The company says it will hire permanent workers to replace the union members who are on strike. And now in another show of solidarity, social media. users have flooded the job listings on the Kellogg's website with fake applications, hoping to

clog up the system. This TikTok user by the name of Sean Black even wrote some code to automate sending in fake applications. While Sean is operating as a one-man band, there's a collective continuing to form across the country, one with a similar affinity for online mischief and lefty politics, and they're taking notice. After that, Gen Z for Change reached out to me and was like, hey, we love what you do. Do you want to join our team? And I said, yes. Gen Z for Change, a youth-led nonprofit that brands itself as, quote, the place where the creator, economy, and progressive politics intersect on social media. Their goal? They say it's to create progressive political change

by leveraging a network of 500 politically engaged creators with a combined following of half a billion. And who is their digital strategist? Sean Wiggs, now 23, out of college, and working full-time as a strategist, coder, and content creator. Yep, of course. Hello. Gen Z for Change has a cache of strategies they use to activate their followers. But these semi-automatic tools, like the browser automations and iOS shortcut Sean made, they are a big part of it.

This website automatically generates an email to either contractors, funders, or local officials, urging them to pull out their stake in cop city. So first, we are going to spam anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. We're going to be spamming them with one-star ratings and honest reviews so that abortion seekers know what these centers actually do. Gen C for Change has put together this website, which lists corporations and their donations to homophobic legislatures in Super PAC. We've made it super easy for y'all to comment, tweet at them, email them,

telling them that they... Taking on some of the biggest political issues of our time, one TikTok and one tool at a time. And now they've got a brand new effort. The push for lawmakers in Washington to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. We just launched a toolkit that allows you to automatically send emails to your representatives, demanding a ceasefire every time you open Instagram. Where a war has left a staggering number of people dead, displaced, and in famine. The Israeli military says it's expanding operations in Gaza with both infantry troops and armored vehicles.

And the reach of this effort is extensive. Two million emails are being sent per day, every day since we launched a tool. I'm Ben iOS Shortcuts Johnson. And I'm Caitlin Browser Automation Hair Up. And this is endless thread. Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. Sean's story starts with a desire to do something that matters at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. So does the story of Gen Z for Change, according to Aiden.

Aiden Cone Murphy, 20 years old, he and his. I'm the founder, board chair, senior advisor of Gen Z for Change, and I'm a sophomore at Harvard. When you meet Aiden, tall, friendly, clad in a sweatshirt for the iconic queer band, Moona, you can immediately tell how passionate he is about the organization he's created. He's also, just like many other college kids, booked, busy, and searching for his ADHD meds in his backpack. So another ADHD pill? Yeah, go ahead. Okay, there it is.

Okay, I got it. Have you ever taken an ADHD pill on bike? Pretty, yes, pretty frequent me. You'd be surprised. I have no shame. Nor should you. That's another thing. We're a very, we're a very ADHD and very queer team.

Like Gen Z is more broadly. When the pandemic started, I think I, like a lot of young people, turned to TikTok as a creative outlet. I think I just thought to myself, I spend a lot of time talking about politics, and I like to hear myself talk like a lot of young people. So he started posting to the app, some political commentary, but also humor, random thoughts, online trends. And I started accumulating followers. And I think by the summer of 2020, I had around 100,000 followers. At this point, Aidan, who grew up in Washington, D.C., is a youth field organizer with the re-election campaign for Massachusetts. Senator Ed Markey.

I was kind of thinking to myself, how can I combine relational organizing and digital organizing? There's this relationship that people's followers really feel like they have with creators. That, in many ways, is good, in many ways is bad. So he starts recruiting his creator friends to the cause. And they start making TikToks inviting their followers to join them in phone banking for the Markey campaign. Especially if you're a first time phone banker, come on out. We'll teach you how to do this. It'll be a great time.

You'll get to meet some of your favorite creators. I think people made around like 2,000 calls and 45 minutes. And in the end, it ended up being one of the more successful phone banks of the campaign. And so I kind of realized there's this power that TikTok has from moving people from caring about an issue into action. When the general election rolls around, Aidan thinks, hey, I wonder if I could do something similar to support the election of candidate Joe Biden. So many people were interested. We got on a Zoom and we were like, and everyone was like, wait, before we start planning this, let me text my friend who has 2 million followers. Let me text my friend who has 3 million followers.

And it really just started snowballing to a point where I think within a week we had like 200 creators involved with like over 200 million combined followers. And I was like, this is a lot of creators. This is a lot of influence. And also my Zoom account does not allow for more than 100 participants. Clearly, I need to think bigger than a phone bank, if not for the reasons of potential, than for the reasons of practicality. How old are you at this point? I was 16 at this time.

16 years old, just a junior in high school. When I was 16 years old, I was not doing this. Neither was I. I actually got a course release for a month. Caitlin, it's been a long time since I was in detention. I mean, high school. What is a course release? So it's like a school-sanctioned blessing to jump out of class and do something else.

In this case, something kind of big, something called TikTok for Biden. And this was a coalition of creators, many of whom talked about politics, many of whom did not talk about politics, and kind of worked with them over the span of a month to make videos that they thought would really resonate with their followers. Between October of 2020 and Election Day, TikTok for Biden blows up. Aiden says they make more than 80 million impressions on TikTok, including more than 20 million on Election Day alone. Which is more impressions than presidential political ads made on TV in the entire third quarter of 2020, and ours was entirely unfunded.

After Biden was elected, they broadened their scope and became Gen Z for change. There are a lot of progressive political advocacy groups out there, some of which are even run by people about its own. as young as Aiden, who today is 20 and has transitioned into the role of board chair and senior advisor. But what makes Gen Z for change unique is not just who runs it, but how it runs. Totally started on TikTok. Everyone, we're almost all creators. And I think what makes us different is that we're creator-led or youth-led.

If we're working on something, it's a matter of texting a friend who's a creator about, like, blasting it out. Or texting one of the hundreds of friends in the Gen Zed. for change creator network to be more specific. We know what various creators in our network are interested in. There's a level of trust where, like, there are so many adults, unfortunately, there's so many, like, I don't know, I say adults. Like, I'm not 20, but like, like, we'll say legal adults. No, I guess I actually am legal.

Okay. Older people who are... Grownups. Grownups, exactly, who are really in the space for the wrong reasons. But I think what's unique about TikTok is one and how quickly, you can get information out there, even without a huge following. Like, you can, it is really the case. And this is how a lot of creators first had success where you have no followers.

You make an account. You post a video. You go to bed. You wake up. It has like three million views. Like, that's a, that is something that happens. And you feel like that's unique to TikTok. That's pretty unique to TikTok.

Aiden told me, he feels like TikTok really lends itself to galvanizing political engagement. Because people have a unique and personal relationship. with the creators they follow. A creator will make a video just like talking and the comments will be like, oh, this feels like I'm on FaceTime with you. Like, it really builds that relationship and trust so much more in a way that, like,

when a creator is talking to their followers, it's not a celebrity talking to their fans. It really, like, on a psychological level, it's much closer to a peer-to-peer model, which is a lot more effective in engaging and mobilizing people. The very mysterious secret sauce that is the TikTok algorithm helps too. Let's say you're a young person who's engaged with like generally pro-crime climate action content.

They might think, oh, if this person engaged with climate content, maybe they would engage with content around labor organizing or infrastructure or education. Suddenly, this theoretical young climate activist is not only seeing content on sea level rise and heat inequity. They might also see videos on union strikes or efforts to fight book bans. without really doing anything on their own. Now, we should say that Gen Z is, of course, not a political monolith, right? But they do lean left. Research from PRRI, a nonprofit that studies the intersection of religion, culture, and politics suggests that Gen Z is more likely to vote Democrat than Republican or independent

and also more likely to identify as liberal than conservative. Yeah, and Gen Z is also more racially and ethnically diverse. than older generations in the U.S. And they identify as LGBTQ at a much higher rate. They're also very much on TikTok. So back by hundreds of TikTok creators and their extensive network of followers, Gen Z for Change starts experimenting with these tools

for mass political engagement. Remember how Sean's first tool was inspired by a campaign on TikTok, the one that encouraged people to flood the Texas abortion whistleblower site, Gen Z for Change was actually involved in that push. We encourage our followers to just send in so much to this tip line that it is going to be impossible to sift through to actually identify individuals

or basically to make it impossible to use. And what information, pray tell, were the kids flooding the site with? Only the best stuff. Hundreds of thousands of young people sent in, like, the script to the B movie. They sent in images of Shrek. They sent in random song lyrics.

Part of this was also about driving attention to the existence of this tip line. So it was kind of a dual-pronged approach. And a few days after young people had started spamming, sending in these false tips, like GoDaddy, it got their attention. And they took down the site. In these actions we've discussed, the sending in of the Shrek images, the Nikki Minaj lyrics, would you call that also trolling? That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know.

I think that trolling is a lot of kind of texie. with it. I would say it's, I don't know, I would call it more making a mockery of, like, poorly thought out right-wing attempts to silence or take away individual freedoms. I think that what we learn from that is, like, doing annoying Gen Z things can actually help pave the way for positive change. We kind of realize that young people, like, want to get involved. So what can we do to remove as many barriers as we can? That's where the tools, like the browser automations Sean makes come in. And these kinds of tools, these automations, can be agents for change or chaos agents.

In the case of the Texas whistleblower site or what Kellogg was doing, Sean's effort sounded to me a lot like the classic hacker tactic of flooding a website with fake traffic so it buckles under the deluge, a distributed denial of service, also known as a DDoS attack. Would you describe these as effectively in some ways like a form of DDoS attack? I would say it's pretty distinct from a DDoS attack itself, specifically because of the main focus of a DDoS attack or a DDoS attack. The goal is to deny other users access to the service itself. And that's not necessarily my goal. My goal is effectively similar to like database poisoning where like other users still able to access the service.

They can go in and fill out their own form if they so choose. But in the database that whoever is maintaining these forms has, they will see those legitimate forms, but also other forms from users who use the tool that also appear to be legitimate as well. It's truly no different than if the users themselves were to go in and filled out the form themselves, my tool just makes it a little bit faster.

And Gen Z for Change is standing up more of these tools and giving them further reach. More on that in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know.

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reach new audiences, whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Okay, we're back. Before the break, Aiden was telling us about Gen Z for Change's goal of removing barriers to civic engagement, and Sean was telling us about the different kinds of semi-automatic tools the coders at Gen Z for Change make. He describes them like this. So I put them usually in like two groups.

Usually we do browser automation, which we call bot campaigns, which is using selenium in Python. Which is very similar to the tool Sean created to flood the Texas whistleblower site. And then we have email campaigns, which are basically ways to get people to send emails to their representatives

or to whoever else that we want to send emails to. But their latest tool, C-Spire Now, is something a little different. It was primarily coded by Sophia Ongela, Gen Z for Change's Director of Strategy. Sean worked on it too. Seasfire Now is utilizing what I did for the iOS shortcut for the Texas Rights to Live abortion site and using that infrastructure to programmatically generate fake or randomized data for the emails to send to people's representatives.

So essentially what it does is when somebody downs the shortcut and sets it up by putting in their district, it will send a request to our API that we've created. API as in application programming interface. It is a tool that often helps different software, often from different companies, work together to create new technology or do new things with existing technology. Like,

it will create an email. It will grab the emails to send it to for the specific representative. So like if you have, like in California District 1, it will take the representative for California. for District 1 and the two senators for California. And it will put that in the space or field in the email. It will take a subject and then programmatically or randomly generate a subject based upon different criteria.

So we have different synonyms for like Palestine, ceasefire, Gaza, Israel. Subject for the email. Yeah. Like the email subject. Yep. And then we have the email body being generated with a bunch of synonyms as well. To make it like more difficult to like filter out. or to like, you know, block certain terms.

Then all that info gets sent back to the user's phone using the shortcut, and presto, the email gets sent without the user ever having to press a button. The user usually puts it an automation, so it does it at a specific time or when they open a specific app. So then it just waits for that automation to occur. Okay, okay. I know that was a lot. The TLDR here, the tool takes advantage of Apple's iOS shortcuts feature. Basically, you can program a simple action you might take every day, opening an app, engaging your phone for a call, something like that.

And that action actually kicks off a whole other set of automatic actions, like sending a message to a politician. And as Aden sees it, that's just part of the organization's greater mission to civically engage young people, one digital campaign at a time. The idea is, if you're aligned with a goal, these institutional barriers, shouldn't stop you. So download the automation and it'll send them. And if the goal is to get a whole ton of messages calling for a ceasefire into lawmakers' inboxes, Gen Z for Change says it's definitely working. We've heard from certain people or certain staffers that it has, they've been getting the emails and it has made an impact in like advocacy. And so we do think it's been successful. it also kind of shows just how much people care about Palestine and calling for a ceasefire.

Because we can see that 2 million emails are being sent per day every day since we launched a tool. Sean says they're able to see where every email is going. And they're not just reaching progressive strongholds. So even in places that aren't like hubs of progressive politics like West Virginia, like you still see thousands of emails being sent to those representatives as well. So it truly shows the amount of power and care that people have and frustration that people have with the representatives for not calling for a ceasefire earlier.

And these emails seem to have been received. Here's one way Sean says they know. When the tool was first set up, the team made a list of lawmakers who had already called for a ceasefire and made them exempt from the email blasts. But they accidentally left a name off that exemption list. And so we were getting reached out to by these offices being like,

hey, we see what you're doing. We love what you're doing. But we've signed a ceasefire resolution. We would like to get back to work, please. Could you add our name to the list? And we were like, we were so sorry. You were not supposed to be getting emails. We will add you to the list now.

Even with all the synonyms in varied language, meant to keep messages out of lawmakers' spam boxes, Sean expects some offices might try. try to get around the thousands of emails they're receiving a day. They could, like, start filtering words like ceasefire or, you know, Palestine or Gaza. And there's not much we can do about that as an organization. But it kind of just shows the people who were willing to do that in the first place, we're not going to be willing to be or listen or open to the constituents advocating for

things in the first place, you know? In reporting this story, we looked at a lot of youth-led organizations on other parts of the political spectrum, conservative, libertarian. and we didn't see anyone else doing anything exactly like this, using semi-automated tools promoted through TikTok at a mass scale to reach a particular outcome. And we asked Sean about this. He didn't seem surprised.

The barrier of entry for creating tools like this is kind of high. You need to have at least some level of technical knowledge to even know how to download VS code or know how to code in the first place. So I don't know any other organization specifically, but I do know other individuals have taken inspiration from the work that I did because I got reached out to from emails or like Instagram DMs or you know Twitter DMs being like hey I love what you do I'm a student at this university can you please like you know give me some advice yeah like or is your code of an open source which it is all of my code

is on GitHub that people can freely fork and repurpose for their own purposes as well Let me ask you about that because I think one of the things that's interesting to me is that you are very transparent about this. And it seems like Gen Z for Change is very transparent about this. And do you worry, I guess, that the stuff that you're doing is going to be copied and used by the other side? One thing that I think is important to understand, which is why the reason why I do this as well, is that nothing that I do would be able to be done if people who created, these websites or advocating for these policies truly cared about like internet security. Like if they truly, because a lot of people like don't really think about, oh, maybe we should have things or mechanisms to stop people from, you know, buying this web page or starting this form.

It's not something that I have like innate knowledge about that nobody else has. If I didn't do my, the Iowa shortcut, somebody a month later could have done the exact same thing and be in this position. And so if me putting my code out there is inspiring, more people to utilize this power and get civically involved to take back digital control, then I think that's doing more good than the horror that would be caused by somebody copycating me from the wrong side. And to Aden, that goal of getting people civically involved, that's really the base metric for success for a project like Gen Z for change.

To me, if we play any role in putting Gaza and the genocide that's going on and the humanitarian crisis that's going on on the minds of members of Congress, their staff, making them realize that this is a priority for young people. And we are not comfortable with our tax dollars, our resources, funding a genocide. And for a long time, it really just didn't seem like members of Congress understood that. And I think that the goal here is to make them understand that this is a reality. Where do you see that going in the future? I think that empowering creators, making them real.

realize that they have massive platforms and that they can actually get their followers involved in influencing change and providing the resources for them to get started and to feel confident doing so. Empowering young people essentially kind of in a similar way to realize that they can take action. They can get involved. All the existing systems work to make people in general, I think especially young people, feel just so powerless and so unable to to materially affect change. And if we don't change that perception, then we can't win. And I mean win in the broadest sense. We can't win progressive victories unless we can inspire people. This episode was reported and produced by Always on TikTok, Caitlin Harrop. And co-hosted by the never on TikTok, always on Reddit, Ben Brock Johnson.

Sound design by Emily Jenkowski. The rest of our team is Amory Severson, Summata Joshi, Grace Tatter, Franny Monty. Donahan, Dean Russell, Matt Reed, and Paul Vikes. We're going to be looking at more stories like this in the run-up to the election. The election, Caitlin, the election. I know. I know. I know. But we want to tell stories of things you care about in this election year. So if you have story ideas from any part of the political spectrum, anything you want to be hearing about, let us know. You can email us at endless thread at wbUR.org. All for now.

Talk to you next week. You know,