Gen Z is rallying against Republican state administrations, and one of the latest campaigns is against Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who announced a new tip line for dissatisfied parents to report teachers for teaching “divisive” subjects.
“We’re asking for folks to send us reports and observations,” Youngkin said, “help us be aware of … their child being denied their rights that parents have in Virginia, and we’re going to make sure we catalog it all … And that gives us further, further ability to make sure we’re rooting it out.”
From there, Gen-Z for Change, a coalition of creators and activists fighting for progressive change, stepped in using TikTok — asking people to flood the tip line with fake messages. Olivia Julianna, an activist working with Gen-Z for Change, led the charge. In a January 25 TikTok that now has over 10,000 likes, Julianna called on viewers to spam Youngkin’s tip line. Her following TikTok videos showed her writing an email with “real tips about her children” and using trendy sound effects to draw attention to the tip line.
“I previously led a social media campaign to take down the anti-abortion website that was set up in Texas, so I had experience using my platform to take down or bring attention to a tip line — but personally speaking, I was angry at how teachers in Virginia were being treated,” Julianna says. “They’re some of the worst paid in the country and there is already a shortage of them (partly because of how many are leaving the education field) so I thought we could use the tip line to bring attention to that issue and attempt to protect teachers from unjust surveillance or the anxiety.”
The link in Gen-Z for Change’s TikTok bio leads users to varying options to become involved in their activism, including one that’s labeled “sent a CRT tip.” From there, people are led to a site where they can click on a button that automatically generates a fake email to Youngkin’s line.
The website, created by Sofia Ongele, a digital coordinator for Gen-Z for Change, states that the generated reports are mostly song lyrics, and options will change each time the page is refreshed.
One example of a generated fake tip, emailed with the subject line “School Teaching Race,” says, “I have reason to believe Dan River High School in Ringgold is teaching race. I overheard my son saying ‘black people deserve equal rights.’”
“I mainly sent messages about the current state of education in Virginia, the truth about what critical race theory (CRT) is, and how it’s important we teach children the truth about history and the people in it,” Julianna says of her own emails to the line.
“Social media is a tool that can be used for good or bad purposes. Unfortunately for the politicians who want to weaponize it against the people, they don’t know how to use it as well as the younger generations do,” she says. “TikTok is a great way to interact with communities and people who have the same beliefs as you. It’s a great way to organize and have discourse online. I think it’s become a sort of safe space for a lot of teenagers to express themselves and their political beliefs, especially when they don’t have the ability to do that in real life.”
Julianna believes that Gen Z, along with being more progressive, also knows how to wield the internet and social media better than older generations — making a TikTok campaign the perfect tool to ask young people to get involved.
“Gen Z is more progressive in their beliefs and I also believe more motivated to deal with the issues that are present in our society. We have several collective generational traumas, like the war on terror, school shootings, economic recessions, and now the pandemic, that have given us all a sense of urgency to combat the issues our politicians and leaders just won’t,” Julianna says. “We deserve a future with certainty that our leaders will do what is best for us collectively, and not what is best for their own political agendas.”
For more stories like this, subscribe to our Things to Do newsletter.