Teen Pregnancy Rates Spike on Social Media
collage by Georgia King @collagebyg
Every time that I’ve opened a social media app this past month, I’ve been met with an array of absolutely incredible content—K-pop fans rallying together to reserve thousands of tickets for Trump’s March 20th Tulsa Rally (not to mention them matching BTS’ million-dollar donation to Black Lives Matter); and undergraduate college student unions/organizations curating meticulous accounts critiquing years of racism, homophobia (insert more -isms and -phobias) at their universities; and teenage YouTubers setting up ad-heavy videos for the purposes of streaming to donate to important causes; and celebrity stans blowing up law enforcement apps with fan cams; and ... Well, you get the point. Young social media users have been making some powerful moves, and Gen Z especially is at the helm of this new era of social media activism.
Simply put, we’re something of an online powerhouse, and the oldest of us barely clock in at 25. Gen Z is birthing change on the digital landscape faster than a Snapchat story disappears—which is fitting, because a lot of the time it feels like social media birthed us.
Social media as we know it began in the early 2000’s with MySpace, but now websites like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and WeChat are running the game. According to Statista and TNW, all four of these recorded at least one billion active users a month in 2018. For many Gen Z members, the familiar terrains of Tumblr, Twitter and every app/website in between shaped much of our pivotal years.
Naturally, social media doesn’t feel like the most useful of platforms to protest the horrendous things happening in real life. But actually, Gen Z is putting our skills to good use, and millions of social media users are interacting with the products of that deliberate usage. K-pop fans are notorious for snatching up tickets and streaming videos. College students aren’t exactly known for quietly letting their universities get away with things. Really, we’re doing what we’ve always done, only now it’s in service of things even bigger than one billion views on Blackpink’s new music video, or lowering astronomical tuition rates by a couple thousand dollars.
It’s this rebirth of social media usage that really interests me, though, something of a mass spike in teen pregnancy rates, if you will. Informative infographics at every corner of your Instagram explore page, creative TikTok jingles inspiring people to donate to organizations in need, popular tweets spreading valuable information that has helped protestors in real time—online, at least, this is what activism is beginning to look like. It’s as innovative and hopeful as it is just, really cool.
There’s certainly been controversy. The “don’t talk to strangers online” warnings many of us remember getting as we first created our Facebook accounts has turned into TikTok being condemned as a national security threat. There’s the usual comments from members of older generations criticizing Gen Z for being ignorant simply because of our youthfulness. And still, we power on.
But the revolution, as I like to say, will not be a pastel infographic. My hope for us is that we’re creating an atmosphere that allows us to eventually be able to get away from merely social media activism and bring our activism to more tangible landscapes, but for now I kind of want to hug everyone protesting so vigorously online. (Or, at the very least, a socially-distanced air five.) Because we’re bringing about some real change. Students and fast-food/retail workers are passing around more of their personal wealth in mutual aid funds than literal billionaires. Mass public uproar created through the spreading of information that the media has overlooked, millions of petition signatures, GoFundMe goal’s reached, and educational resources being rapidly shared fuels the revolution, too.
Social media—which in many ways parented us, for better or worse—has now become an environment for Gen Z to give birth to our own goals. The baby? Liberation. Of course, you might have to wade through a ridiculous amount of dance challenge TikToks to Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage,” or a couple thousand quoted tweets of food videos demanding “Is this cake?” But, hey. It’s social media.
