Inside the progressive movement's TikTok army

Outside calculus class, Kohn-Murphy is the founder and executive director of Gen-Z for Change, a coalition of about 500 progressive social media influencers spanning all of the internet’s most-trafficked social media platforms. The coalition’s primary digital stomping ground is TikTok, where Gen-Z for Change’s influencer network collectively boasts upward of 500 million followers — a figure that far exceeds the average monthly viewerships of Fox News, CNN and MSNBC combined, which tops out at about 5 million viewers.

Gen-Z for Change has already mobilized its followers to carry out a handful of unorthodox online actions — including crashing an anti-abortion whistleblower line in Texas with raunchy memes. But Kohn-Murphy has higher ambitions: As more politicians in Washington begin using TikTok to reach young voters, his organization is building closer ties with Democrats in Washington in the hopes of not only commenting on policy, but actually influencing it. Yet in making inroads into the political mainstream, do Gen Z’s digital warriors risk sacrificing the transgressiveness that makes them a distinctive voice of their generation?

“We want to be able to advocate and to push for the policies that Gen Z believes in,” Kohn-Murphy says. “Not to be revolutionary, but there’s a lot wrong with the world, and if we can use our platform to make positive change and leave the world better than we found it, then we’ll have done our job.”