In September 2018, Rayne Fisher-Quann joined tens of thousands of Ontario students who walked out of their classrooms after the local government repealed their recently modernized sex-ed curriculum. Rayne, 18, was the organizer behind the day of action, using a network of Instagram accounts to convince students at over 100 schools to participate. She told Teen Vogue she had a lot of followers on Instagram before the protest, and organizing a youth-led movement via a social media platform teens were already using made it feel like a “movement that was by them and that existed for them.”
In the aftermath, Rayne found herself thrust into the public eye, just like so many other youth activists of this generation. The 2010s saw social media pour fuel on political uprisings like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street; overnight, individual activists, like March for Our Lives’ Emma Gonzalez, became famous for their speeches and acts of protest.
Rayne recalls Googling her name after the school walkout and seeing adult men having conversations about how they wanted to rape her. She said she had stalkers who found her address and identified her family members, and that she received death threats via Twitter.
“I had the highest highs and the lowest lows that I think you could possibly experience on social media,” Rayne told Teen Vogue. “It was a trip.”
While there’s plenty of precedent for youth-led movements throughout history, the social media age has changed everything for young activists. Their organizing savvy on social media provides opportunities to transcend traditional institutional gatekeepers, assists with fundraising either via crowdfunding platforms or apps like Venmo, and allows for movements to be truly youth-driven, using platforms that don't require adults, like TikTok or Rayne’s Instagram organizing structure.
“Social media has revolutionized the ‘long-distance relationship,’” Ryan Pascal, 17, told Teen Vogue, explaining that she organizes with other activists via Instagram DMs and uses Snapchat for the most effective advertising. Ryan launched her school’s walkout in response to the Marjory Stone Douglas school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 by posting a graphic to Snapchat. She now serves on the Students Demand Action advisory board. Like Rayne, Ryan also faced backlash: After writing an op-ed on how arming teachers would disproportionately affect students of color, Ryan, who is black, said she was met with racial slurs. “It got so bad that I took a break from Twitter, took a few days off from school, and amped up my security on all of my social media accounts,” she recalled.
Rayne's and Ryan’s stories speak to the dual nature of youth-led social justice movements that were born and nurtured online. The proliferation of social media platforms has brought young activists unprecedented opportunities and exposure. A hashtag like #MarchForOurLives or #BlackLives Matter neatly bundles a message that can explain an entire movement, and it can spread like wildfire through the networks young activists are able to harness. But the downsides of online organizing are frightening and numerous, including harassment, surveillance, and increased public pressure on those who may still be too young to vote.