Game the System for Good
Tags: Platform, Creativity, Social Media, Democracy, In The Know

Teenagers will always find creative ways to cut class, but the way they did it during quarantine deserves a long second look. When school closures forced students in China to complete assignments through a remote learning app, they flooded it with hundreds of one-star ratings to get it delisted from the App Store. No app means no downloads; no downloads mean no class. Eat your heart out, Ferris Bueller.

Targeted, coordinated actions like that one can shake up entire outcomes. That’s how young people showed up at President Trump’s re-election campaign rally in Tulsa over Juneteenth weekend — by not showing up.

If the hundreds of thousands of ticket registrations were anything to go by, the arena should have been packed with wildly enthusiastic Trump supporters. Yet there were only 6,000 people in attendance, filling barely a third of the 19,000 seats.

The curious case of the empty arena confused campaign organizers and pleased opponents alike. Chalk one up for the resourceful TikTok users who banded together to sign up for the event in droves without actually intending to go — just like skip day. In one fell swoop, teens took down a campaign rally from the comfort and safety of their homes.

Extremely Online teens these days can organize around pretty much anything they set their minds to. Armed with eye-catching content, K-pop fans have readapted tactics that make their favorite songs and artists go viral to fight racism online. Together, they drowned out racist, anti-Black hashtags like #WhiteLivesMatter, #WhiteoutWednesday and #BlueLivesMatter by flooding them with unrelated entertaining memes and fan-cam videos until Twitter’s trending algorithm classified it as “k-pop” instead of “politics.”

Review-bombing, no-show pranks and hashtag-spamming are all guerilla tactics being deployed in a new warlike situation. As teens apply their social media know-how to scale the impact of their social activism, they’ve redirected people’s attention to matters of national interest. And most of them can’t even vote yet.

TikTok, Tinder and YouTube have become similar breeding grounds for digital natives looking to game the system for good.

Take the video on TikTok of a police officer detaining a handcuffed Black woman singing “you about to lose your job!” It took off, inspiring countless #LoseYoJob remixes and dance challenges that spilled over into the streets as a protest anthem against police brutality.

On Tinder, Dakota Rouse started a fundraising trend where she only responded to matches whose opening line was a screenshot of a signed petition or donation to a Black Lives Matter-related cause.

Homebound activists on YouTube raised funds for the BLM movement by putting up hour-long monetized videos celebrating Black artists of all kinds, the ad revenue from which were donated to supporting nonprofits. One such video from user Zoe Amira — later pulled down for violating Google’s monetization terms — was viewed over 7.5 million times and raised more than $21,000. Someone called it “a genius way of turning capitalism towards activism.”

When the system doesn’t work for you, you work the system. A number of radical, minority-led community efforts during the 70s were born out of the same spirit. The Young Lords took over the nurses’ wing at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx for 24 hours to protest public health conditions and demand better care, an action that won the community a hospital reconstruction that was 20 years in the planning. The Black Panthers fed hungry Black kids before school for free by running community programs that were eventually dismantled, but they set a precedent for free breakfast programs in schools across the country.

Provocative as they may have been, both initiatives created the discomfort necessary to draw attention to inequality and resulted in better services for the people.

Malcolm Gladwell once wrote that the revolution will not be tweeted. A decade later, not only has the revolution been tweeted, but liked, hashtagged, spammed, commented on, Instagrammed, Venmo’d, TikTok’d and shared on Google Docs.

The result is, social media companies must adjust to their 2020 role of facilitating important civic discourse. If American democracy is a raucous frat party, they’re the designated drivers, forced to behave responsibly in order keep everyone else safe. If they falter, we all die, or worse, re-elect 45.

We’ve come a long way from learning how our Facebook news feeds were weaponized to circulate hate and misinformation and undermine the results of the 2016 presidential elections. Four years later, teens are bending the same platforms to their will for positive social change. Even companies have joined in. Patagonia, The North Face and Ben & Jerry’s, for instance, are calling out Facebook for “doing too little to stop hate speech on its platforms” by boycotting their ad spends as part of the #StopHateForProfit campaign.

From cutting class to selling out stadiums at campaign rallies, young vigilantes prove there’s no challenge too great when enough people come together to creatively confront the structures designed to keep them in place. How can we subvert the systems that no longer serve us? Platforms built to entertain and distract us can also be used to make us pay attention and take action. Social networks designed to profit from our time and attention can be retooled to align with their original intention: create new ways for people to build trust with each other.