#NeverBefore #NeverAgain

When 17 children were killed in another school shooting in the USA three weeks ago, I scrolled past it in my newsfeed. I didn’t need to read the story or the aftermath to know the narrative: an angry young white man had legally bought a gun and shot his classmates. Families are devastated, communities are blighted, Democrats call for fewer guns, Republicans call for more guns, the NRA is suspiciously silent, deep state conspiracy theories abound, there are moments of silence, everyone sends their thoughts and prayers and that’s that until the next one.

It’s hard not to be cynical when it’s the same shtick week in week out.

Except a teenage girl called Emma Gonzalez, sporting a Furiosa buzzcut and a sense of righteousness, stood up and issued a battle cry at a rally in Fort Lauderdale a few days after the shooting. This was not a little girl, content to follow the script and thank you for the thoughts and prayers of her President. It was an extraordinary piece of rhetoric, peppered with the idioms and intonations of any other teenager. But here, when she said “well, duh”, she was addressing President Trump.

It was notable but not unique; victims forming pro-gun control movements isn’t new, either. Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America has been around since the Columbine shooting, the parents of the Sandy Hook massacre have their own group. But they are formed by the parents, and woefully outgunned on the media, both mainstream and online platforms.

So I knew, without looking, that the usual right wing tactics were going to be employed. The whole shooting was a false flag (didn’t happen), the teenagers on TV were paid actors, and it was all a deep state conspiracy to take away their guns. I didn’t need to read the articles to know that it was happening, because it was what always happened.

More survivors of the shooting appeared at rallies and as talking heads on the news. David Hogg, another student and a journalist waiting to happen, was another articulate teenager, an alternative to the passion of Emma Gonzalez; a smooth, media literate boy who knows how to play the game. More and more students have reacted with poise and eloquence on social media and on the mainstream media, Rebecca Schneid and Cameron Kasky among others.

They have channelled every ounce of naivety that comes with youth – the total disregard for what is impossible – teenage petulance and self-righteousness for a righteous cause – and sledge-hammer energy. But none of that is new. Young activists are not new, every progressive social change has been led by young people, for those very reasons.

What is new is that this generation of activists are media literate, using the very tools that have been utilised on the media that led to Trump and Brexit against those movements.

So, while you could assume that any sense of human decency would have told us that the children spoke from an untouchable platform, that obviously didn’t stop right wing trolls on social medial. When the death threats, rape threats and doxxing arrived, these teenagers cracked their knuckles and employed the skills they have been practicing all their lives. They know what works, they know to pressure boycotts of the NRA, they know to make politicians squirm at Town Hall meetings over NRA campaign funding, they know to call out the lies of the opposition. They know to lean into the fight.

Because this is the first intuitively media literate generation. They could type before they could write. They feed the trolls to perpetuate the media attention and then hijack it for their agenda. As Aaron Sankin Tweeted, “Adult political figures trying to beat teens at Twitter owns is the social media equivalent of getting involved in a land war in Asia.”

This comes in the wake of #MeToo, #Timesup and #BlackLivesMatter, which came in the wake of the #Occupy and #MakePovertyHistory campaigns before them. These teenagers have grown up online, with these hashtags, they have observed what works and what doesn’t, and now they are putting these skills into practice. This might possibly be the turning point for young people getting involved in democratic engagement.

Whether that’s good or not depends where you are. The disproportionately high youth vote for the right wing Jobbik Party in Hungary, for instance, and growing discontent particularly in the young white male demographic across Europe, is something to be mindful of when we talk about young people and the media. The rise of far right sentiment among young people has been put down to disillusionment with the establishment, making true the adage – those who believe in nothing will believe anything.

So while older generations have accidentally armed young people with a mass of incredible skill, media literacy is not just the capacity to engage and use the media, it is also the capacity to find and believe what is reliable, trustworthy and useful. Otherwise we will have created a monster.