When an anti-abortion group last week created a “pro-life whistleblower” website encouraging people to anonymously report violations of Texas’ new six-week abortion ban, a group of politically active Texans noticed one potentially fatal flaw.
“They’re trying to use the internet to retaliate against people who were raised on the internet,” said Olivia Julianna, an 18-year-old student and activist from Sugar Land who is among the leadership of a group called “Gen Z-For Change.” The group was formerly known as “TikTok for Biden.”
Olivia, who goes by only her first and middle names on social media due to safety concerns, said the goal was clear: “This website, if we can mess with them in any way, if we can stop even one woman from having a lawsuit filed against her or waste even a second of their time, we need to do it.”
The tip site was meant to help enforce Senate Bill 8, the Texas law that went into effect at the start of this month that prohibits abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, before most women know they’re pregnant.
The law has so far avoided being blocked by the courts because the government does not enforce it. Instead, it puts enforcement in the hands of any private citizen who wishes to sue an abortion provider or others who “aid or abet” someone getting an illegal abortion, with a possible reward of at least $10,000 per successful suit.
Olivia was one of several young left-leaning activists who immediately took to social media to sabotage the site by flooding it with false reports and other information — some suggested anti-Gov. Greg Abbott sayings. Others recommended off-the-wall responses or nonsense.
She and other members of Gen Z-For Change — Generation Z is typically defined as those who are now 18 to 24 — quickly got to work.
“It would be really, really bad and morally wrong of all of you to go to ProLifeWhistleblower.com and send in an anonymous tip that is fake,” Olivia sarcastically told her more than 137,000 followers in an Aug. 23 video she posted on TikTok. “It would be even worse if your anonymous tip was about Greg Abbott.”
Another popular content creator and Deputy Executive Director of Gen Z-For Change, Victoria Hammett, 22, saw her video and found it “absolutely brilliant” and encouraged her followers to do the same.
“Wouldn't it be so awful if we send in a bunch of fake tips and crashed the site?” she said in a TikTok that’s been liked over 240,000 times.
Olivia said she was inspired by a similar campaign launched by TikTokers in June 2020 when users, many of them teenagers, pranked a rally for former President Donald Trump by falsely RSVPing for thousands of tickets. Despite more than a million registrations, turnout was about 6,200, considerably lower than expected, which the activists chalked up as a success.
“I’ve seen more organization and passion from young people in the last two years than I have from adults in my entire life,” said Olivia, whose social media content centers on Texas and national politics. “I’m 18 years old, and I have 120,000 followers on TikTok, and I’ve had millions upon millions of views. I have actual politicians follow me on social media platforms. They’re utilizing us in their campaigns; they’re using us to market to young people and get them engaged in voting.”
Other heavy users of social media had virtually the same idea simultaneously, and fake tips were soon flooding the tip site launched by Texas Right to Life.
Some saboteurs used coding skills to propel the fake complaint idea even further by creating scripts that would repeatedly file reports with random information.
Olivia said she originally heard about the fake complaint idea from her friend Kolleen Whitford, a 32-year-old music sponsorships account director who tweets about Texas politics.
The speed of the movement goes to show the power that Generation Z can have in shifting larger political conversations, Whitford said. “Gen Z really helped light fire into this and it wasn’t just Gen Z that agreed with them.”
Immediate results
TikTok For Biden, which launched in October 2020 and later formally partnered with the Biden Campaign, consisted of more than 300 creators with a combined following of over 150 million people, said executive director Aidan Kohn-Murphy, 17, who helped found the group.
“Our work during the election was just the beginning because our goal wasn’t electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The goal was using our platform to create some sort of social change,” Kohn-Murphy said.
The group has now expanded to about 500 creators with a combined following of over 400 million people.
“We knew that TikTok was the most effective way to reach young people quickly,” Kohn-Murphy said. “The TikTok algorithm works in a way no other apps do because you can post something and you can have your followers post something, go to bed and wake up in the morning and it has 10 million views. That is something that can happen on TikTok that really can’t happen on Instagram or Twitter.”
Even though about a third of the group’s members are under 18 and can’t vote, that doesn’t stop them from wanting to take action in any way possible to advance progressive causes, he said.
Gen Z-For Change caught the attention of former state Senator Wendy Davis, who is known for her 13-hour filibuster of an anti-abortion bill in 2013. Davis now runs a nonprofit, Deeds Not Words, that seeks to help cultivate the next generation of young leaders.
“I just think it’s such a smart and wonderfully appropriate way for young people to exercise their power,” Davis said in an interview Tuesday.
A 2021 Pew Research survey found that 67 percent of adults under 30 years old believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
Given how they’ve grown up with the internet and social media, it’s no wonder their activism is taking place online, said Amanda E. Scott, a senior lecturer in English at Texas State University who has studied generational differences in methods of engagement.
“Young people have a more sophisticated relationship to communication literacy in general,” Scott said. “They have a handle of it in surprising and nuanced ways. In the last three years especially, they seem to be able to cut through — or in some cases more radically disrupt — the artificiality of political pandering.”
GoDaddy steps out
The Texas Right to Life’s whistleblower website is not currently operating. Instead, it redirects to the organization’s main website while the group searches for a new hosting and domain service, said spokewoman Kimberlyn Schwartz. The eventual new website will contain “new security protocols to protect our users,” she said.
On Friday, GoDaddy, the site’s former internet hosting service, terminated its relationship with Texas Right to Life, bending to pressure and abuse reports from activists. The company said it did so because the group violated its terms of service, which prohibit the collection of personal data without someone’s written consent.
“I think that the pro-abortion crowd sees the website as a symbol of the law, and they’re trying to take down the website because they cannot take down the law,” Schwartz said. “They cannot stop the fact that we’re saving about 100 pre-born babies a day. That’s why they’re trying to cancel us, but it’s not working.”
Schwartz added that the scripts that send multiple false reports to the website could be prosecuted as felonies.
Younger generations might overall skew left, but Schwartz said on the issue of abortion, she believes they’re moving right.
“We have a vibrant movement of young people on the pro-life side,” she said. “We’ve grown up with sonograms and hearing the heartbeat and being able to see that life in very real time and know about it … That’s the reason younger people are becoming more pro-life.”
For Olivia, though, it doesn’t matter that the false reports can’t actually change policy. Instead, it’s about the larger message, she said.
“I’m a fourth-generation Texan. I’ve lived here my whole life. I’m also a Mexican-American,” she said. “Me and all other women and immigrants and Mexican Americans and people of color and Gen Z in Texas are not going to stop until these people who keep trying to take away our autonomy and our rights are out of office.”
“We grew up on Divergent and Hunger Games and all these things,” Olivia said, referring to the dystopian books and movies. “They taught us to fight for what we believe in. To stand up for what we think is right. So now we're doing that.”
taylor.goldenstein@chron.com
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