By Natalie Tran
In recent years, social media has become a key venue for activism and social justice. Through easy accessibility using hashtags, infographics, campaigns and calls for protests, social media has garnered activists from all over the world and has created an environment where voices, especially the young peoples’, could be amplified. All it takes is a click to share.
With this surge in digital activism, we are seeing the emergence of student advocacy, primarily through platforms like Instagram and Twitter. Brightly colored informational slideshows with eye-catching fonts seem to have overtaken Instagram’s Explore page while promoting awareness on political and social topics. We’ve seen so many of these student-led activist groups, and now we have our very own in the Huntington Beach High School District (HBUHSD) community.
Established in July of 2020, ‘Sincerely, Gen Z’ is a student-led organization aiming to educate young people on social, political and cultural issues as well as dispelling miscommunications across different generations through social media. The organization originated in HBUHSD and was founded by three students: senior Thaovi Nguyen and sophomore Ian Bui from Fountain Valley High School and sophomore Cynthia Bui from Edison High School.
“[Our] main mission with ‘Sincerely, Gen Z’ is to connect older generations with younger generations through social media,” Cynthia Bui said. “Many of us have faced the generational gap between our parents and grandparents when trying to discuss social topics with them, which is why it’s so important to bridge that gap so that issues can be properly addressed. ‘Sincerely, Gen Z’ is trying to fix that.”
The founders of ‘Sincerely, Gen Z’ didn’t always plan to start their organization from scratch. In fact, their first idea was to start a new chapter of an existing platform.
“Our organization originally started as the HBUHSD chapter of ‘Dear Asian Youth,’ but when we started talking, we realized we were talking a lot about Asian issues,” Cynthia Bui said. “One thing we kept mentioning was how we wanted to create a guide on how to talk to your Asian parents about certain social topics because there’s always that fine line of wanting to voice your opinion but also not wanting to be disrespectful because, in Asian culture, the big thing is that the elder is always right.”
That difference in focus led Cynthia Bui, Ian Bui and Thaovi Nguyen to start an organization independent of ‘Dear Asian Youth.’
Of course, creating a student organization from scratch comes with many difficulties. ‘Sincerely, Gen Z,’ for example, faced a challenge borne of their rapid success—learning how to adapt to their audience growth.
“We had a pretty good base to start with but as we started making more posts, we gained a bigger following…that was when we decided to send out board applications so that we could have more hands-on-deck,” Cynthia Bui said. “It started mainly in Orange County, locally with the HBUHSD schools. But then it started growing across the country…we had people from Texas and New York apply…and it went even crazier as we had people from Myanmar, India and Australia.”
Increasing diversity within the ‘Sincerely, Gen Z’ team led to another unexpected issue: time zones.
“It was really hectic at first because communication was very hard…we would set up meetings at 8 a.m. but it would be 3 a.m. for someone else so we had to set up multiple meetings,” Cynthia Bui said. “A big important skill for sure when starting a new organization is having strong communication because you have to ensure that people are doing their jobs and if people don’t do their jobs, it puts the whole organization at a stop. But despite that, it’s pretty fun with all the different people that we have.”
While informative graphics and stories are effective for the younger audience, digital media does have its limitations. Language barriers, credibility issues and adult authority are all problems that come along with activism, particularly youth activism. Thus, ‘Sincerely, Gen Z’ has worked to combat those issues by looking for alternatives and asking for assistance when needed.
“One of our main priorities as ‘Sincerely, Gen Z,’ is to bridge the gap between our generation and generations before us, and to do that, we need to somehow break the language barrier,” Ian Bui said. “To do this, we wanted to expand our articles and publications to Vietnamese newspapers in our local communities. Additionally, after our writers would finish writing their articles, our student translators would translate the piece where we could then spread it to Vietnamese newspapers or simply other viewers who are not fluent in English.”
And to ensure that their posts weren’t misleading or biased, ‘Sincerely, Gen Z’ made sure to look for credible sources and cite the sources at the end of their posts.
The sad truth about putting content on the Internet is that there will always be criticism—unfortunately, it’s a natural byproduct of social media. However, ‘Sincerely, Gen Z’ has found ways to work around their “haters.” Instead of taking the hate they receive to heart, the group instead views it as constructive criticism, which they take into consideration when creating future content.
“With everything being online and on social media, obviously you’re going to have your haters as well as people who support you,” Nguyen said. “When we first started, one of the main issues we had was clarity in our posts because some would say that our infographics were too blurry and the colors weren’t as bright or bold…we took all those into consideration for our future posts.”
By being open-minded to feedback and ideas, ‘Sincerely, Gen Z’ was also able to more comfortably choose and approach sensitive topics.
“Another issue we had was coming up with specific topics we wanted to do… at first, we were hesitant to tackle such big controversial topics that are going on because we’re just kids and we don’t want to get that backlash yet as a new organization,” Nguyen said. “So as we grew our platform more, we put out an Instagram questionnaire on our story to ask our viewers what types of issues they’d like to see.”
The group is currently on a hiatus as it prepares for Nguyen’s graduation, which will require the organization to transition to new leadership for the coming year. It plans, however, to become active again in the near future.
“Currently, we are on a pause right now so that we could restructure and like we said, communication was really hard with all the different individuals that we had on our team,” Nguyen said. “So we wanted to take some time to really get into the details and structure inside of our organization before we put out any more posts. But we do plan to continue this in the future with Ian and Cynthia as the new main heads of the organization.”
Even as she prepares to leave the organization in Ian Bui and Cynthia Bui’s hands, Nguyen says she’s loved the opportunity ‘Sincerely, Gen Z’ has given her to broaden her global perspective.
“Being able to work with such a diverse group of individuals might be my favorite part of ‘Sincerely, Gen Z,’” Nguyen exclaimed. “We have people from such crazy areas and backgrounds so I found it really interesting to see their perspective on the things and topics that we conceive in our daily lives and how some of the topics in our community are also present in other regions of the world.”
