86 International The EconomistDecember 21st 2019
21gives them outsized power. Greta Thun-
berg, a teenage activist in Sweden, started
the global “school strike for climate” which
has now spread to 150 countries. Protests
led by students, some still in high school,
have erupted across the world, from Hong
Kong to Chile. Politicians, policymakers
and media executives should pay atten-
tion: how news is made, spread and con-
sumed by teenagers today will determine
what happens to their countries and busi-
nesses tomorrow. As one 13-year-old told
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an American
lawmaker, “I’m not old enough to vote yet,
but I can follow you on Instagram!”
To best understand this future, look to
America. It has the world’s most vibrant
media ecosystem and is home to most of
the platforms used by youth around the
world, including Instagram, WhatsApp,
Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat. (TikTok,
wildly popular with younger teens, is Chi-
nese and strictly moderated for political
content.) American media wield influence
around the world and are widely aped: the
New York Timesboasts readers everywhere;
websites such as BuzzFeed have inspired
similar clickbait sites in dozens of coun-
tries. And America’s political and cultural
vocabulary is pervasive. A meme that starts
there has a good chance of spreading
throughout the world.
The arena for those memes has
changed. Since the 2016 presidential elec-
tion in America Facebook has come under
intense scrutiny for its role as a platform
for news distribution. But to many Western
teenagers the social network is deeply un-
cool. It is for old people. Nor do many of
them hang out on Twitter, which plays an
outsized role in journalism and politics
only because it is full of journalists and
politicians (and Donald Trump). They have
little time for youth-focused websites such
as BuzzFeed either. “It’s clearly adults try-
ing to relate to young people,” says Victo-
ria, a 16-year-old in Kentucky. Teenagers
deride outlets that just a few years ago were
hailed as the next big thing: Griffin, a 16-
year-old from the Chinese city of Wuxi, dis-
misses Jinri Toutiao (“Today’s Headlines”),
China’s most popular news app with 120m
daily users, as clickbait for adults.
The action has shifted to Instagram
(owned by Facebook), WhatsApp (ditto)
and YouTube (owned by Google), each of
which has well over a billion users. (Snap-
chat is popular in America but less so else-
where.) Pew reports that 85% of American
teenagers use YouTube; more than 70% use
Instagram. Common Sense, an American
non-profit group, found in a recent study
that 69% of American teens watch online
videos every day, mostly on YouTube. They
spend nearly seven and a half hours a day
looking at screens of all kinds.
Instagram is an odd destination for
those seeking the news. Users post picturesto their “grid”, mostly pretty ones. The app
allows only one link per account—in the
bio. And it has no formal reposting mecha-
nism. But the introduction of “Stories” in
2016, which allowed its users to post short-
lived images with annotations, added text
to a largely visual platform, made sharing
and reposting easier and supercharged its
growth. Stories also allow those with more
than 10,000 followers to share links to oth-
er material. Where users went, so did those
who hope to influence them: advertisers,
marketers, politicians, propagandists and
miscellaneous mischief-makers have all
piled into Instagram.
Consider the Amazon. By late August,
anyone with an Instagram account any-
where in the world would have known that
“the Amazon rain forest—the lungs which
produces 20% of our planet’s oxygen—is
on fire,” as Emmanuel Macron, France’s
president, put it in a post on August 22ndthat was liked by nearly 200,000 people.
On the same day National Geographic’s ac-
count, the 11th-most followed on Instagram
(126m followers), posted about fires in the
Amazon, as did Leonardo DiCaprio (an
American actor, 38m); Prilly Latuconsina
(an Indonesian actress, 32m); and Malaika
Arora (an Indian model, 10m). Two days lat-
er nasa(51m) fanned the Instagram flames
with a fresh satellite image.This is fine
Posts about Amazonian fires were soon in-
escapable—as were allegations that big
news outlets were ignoring it. “It’s the only
thing I saw for weeks,” says Dylan, a 17-
year-old pupil in Lexington, Kentucky.
“Whatever I saw about the Amazon I would
share it,” says Stacy, a 15-year-old Bosto-
nian. Unscrupulous accounts tried to take
advantage of the disaster, asking for dona-
tions or promising to plant a tree for every“like”. The world’s press subsequently ran
articles, many of which debunked false-
hoods on Instagram, such as Mr Macron’s
assertion that the Amazon produces 20%
of the world’s oxygen. In interviews con-
ducted by The Economistwith two dozen
teens in Lexington, Kentucky and Boston,
every one of them mentioned the fires un-
prompted. “The fires in the Amazon were
not getting very much coverage,” says Oli-
via Seltzer, a 15-year-old Californian who
two years ago started The Cramm, a news-
letter for teenagers that goes out on Insta-
gram and via email and text message. There
is “a lot of frustration that these kinds of
stories aren’t heard about. A lot of young
people are taking it on to themselves to in-
form their peers.”
News outlets native to Instagram are
also springing up. Not everything they cov-
er is serious. @nowthisnews (2m follow-
ers) combines text overlaid on brief video
clips about everything from political prot-
ests in Hong Kong to a dog with a tail on its
head. (It also publishes on other platforms
such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.)
@houseofhighlights (15m) is dedicated to
clips of American sports. In 2015 it was ac-
quired by Bleacher Report, a large sports
news website. Both accounts are in the top
ten on Instagram for engagement, as mea-
sured by the number of likes and com-
ments accrued, according to Axios, anoth-
er news website. “We’ve had the distinct
advantage that we’ve never tried to take
something that worked in a legacy medium
and force fit it into the digital age,” says
Howard Mittman, Bleacher’s ceo. Other
outlets, he says, are like the “divorced uncle
who bought the right convertible in the
wrong colour, who has cool clothes, but
they just don’t look good on him”.
Another hugely popular Instagram-na-
tive outlet is @theshaderoom (17m), which
deals mostly in celebrity news and gossip
(though it also posted about the Amazon
fires). If tmzupended traditional celebrity
reporting in the era of the blog, @theshade-
room is doing it again on social media.
Sometimes the streams cross. “I was scroll-
ing a post about Cardi B”—a singer with
56m followers—“and the comments were
like, ‘Why aren’t you talking about the Am-
azon?’” says Jaliyah, a 15-year-old in Bos-
ton. Young people are “very complicated in
how they’re consuming media”, says
Samhita Mukhopadhyay, the executive edi-
tor of Teen Vogue. “They can kind of toggle
between Justin Bieber and they want to
know exactly what Greta Thunberg is doing
and they will show up to the rally.”
In the Arab world memes use cartoons
or screen grabs from old movies to make
light of political grimness. Elsewhere
thousands of accounts changed their pro-
file pictures this summer to a deep blue or
striking red—the former to raise awareness
about protests in Sudan and the latter to