a couple years ago back in my home state of Illinois a 9-year-old kid named asan Johnson stepped up to a Podium grabbed a microphone and made his voice heard now a few weeks earlier the city of Chicago had announced that a Shan school and dozens others like it would be closed down and so this 9-year-old kid decided that he would speak out and so microphone in hand so small he could barely see over the podium his voice echoed throughout the city of Chicago they should not be closing these schools that need protection and safety they
should be investing in these schools not closing them they should be supporting these schools not closing them we shall not be move today those were his words we are not toys we're not going down without a fight and no matter what your politics are there is something remarkable about a 9-year-old kid getting up to a Podium before a microphone and saying something like that it's remarkable but it's also rare it's so rare nowadays that we see young people stepping up to the stage and speaking out and actually being listened to but I can understand why
I mean when I was Sean's age I was painfully shy and as far as the world around me went I felt I felt totally isolated I felt voiceless I felt powerless I think a lot of us have felt that way before and even now when I look at the political system that we live in I'm tempted to feel that way I mean what I see in the corridors of power in places like Washington and Westminster it seems like politics is all about money and Corruption and these Smoke Filled rooms deliberately obscured from our sight and
kept from our reach and so there is this disconnect between what politics seems to be about and what it's really about the lived experiences and the voices of kids like aan but not everyone can do what he did that day now I know that I never could and so the question becomes is there some way that we can Empower Our Generation even shy kids like me to step up to the microphone and make our voices heard and reach the people who for so long have been deaf to us a few years ago I had the
chance to witness firsthand a new tool that's empowering Our Generation in that way in the 2012 US presidential election I worked on the Obama campaign and my job was to run the National Youth Outreach online now in that election the political pundit they said that young people wouldn't engage in the election they said that we wouldn't vote in the election I had this feeling I had this this optimism that somehow our generation would find a way and what I saw in the months that followed was it was so inspiring it made me feel the same
way that I felt when I looked up at Ashan Johnson but this time the microphone was different now it wasn't one that rested on top of a Podium it was one that we carry with us every single day in our pockets in our backpacks on our desks at home that new microphone was the internet I learned during that campaign that this new political microphone it works in two big ways you know first broadly social media is dominated by Young Voices and politicians who want to communicate with us they need to do so and they need
to engage in the online world that we've created and secondly on a more micro level young people are Gatekeepers for political messaging in a way that we've never been before and social media is different from other forms of communication because we're the ones who decide what images and what moments and what messages get magnified and which ones fade now I'm not saying that social media is this Panacea for all of the problems in our politics far from it I'm not saying that it's going to start some Revolution where we're going to upend the politics of
old it's not going to happen but I'm saying that it gives us one more way to have our voices sneak into those darken Corners where they haven't belonged for far too long and that maybe it should make us feel a little bit less voiceless a little bit less isolated a little less powerless so let's talk about the internet and the online world that we've created when aan stepped up to that Podium and behind that microphone he was making a statement by his very presence on the stage that his voice was as valuable as anyone else's
and that's one of the principles that is intrinsic to a free and fair internet you know the idea that you and I can from behind a flickering computer screen reach hundreds of people at the touch of a button but by the time the 2012 election came about we weren't just creating content online young people our generation we were also consuming it and we weren't watching CNN or listening to talk radio most young people were getting their news from the internet one of the sites we used was a site called Reddit and so we decided that
why not let's have the president give it a try so Barack Obama the sitting president of the United States he made an account on Reddit I think it was President Obama and he did what hundreds of ordinary people before him had done and ask me anything where he pledged to answer the most popular questions as voted on by the Reddit community and it was a huge success he even made news by supporting a constitutional amendment to help take money out of politics the president's decision to engage with young people on a platform that we created
and on our level he was rewarded for it it was so successful that Reddit added 60 more servers and they still couldn't handle the traffic but we all know that there is a darker side to the internet and social media you know too often people including in our generation hide behind the mask of anonymity and do shameful things or create these Echo chambers that can be as corrosive to the political system as the money and the power and the Smoke Filled rooms but the difference is we actually have the power to change the online world
as long as we have a free and fair internet for the most part the internet is and will be whatever we choose to make of it and that's the second thing about this new political microphone we're the ones who control it and if politicians want to use it then they need to give us messages they need to give us moments they need to give us images that we actually want to share that we're proud to share with our friends and for us on the campaign it was a simple numbers game we looked at the list
of young people that we needed to mobilize we realized that half of them couldn't be reached by traditional political communication because young people tend to move around a lot and don't tend to use landlines but 85% of that same group was just a single connection away on social media and we also learned from our research team the extremely startling fact that young people tend not to trust politicians I can't imagine why but we also put a great amount of trust in our friends and so from the campaign's perspective we need to aggressively engage on social
media both so that we can reach more young people but also so we could reach them in a more more powerful way an example that my boss likes to use is when the editor of buzzfeed.com which is a social News website when he was asked why they don't publish celebrity gossip he said you got to think about when people consume celebrity gossip know people buy those magazines in line at grocery stores and at airports when they're alone and they pray to God that no one especially anyone they know will see them and so content works
on these two different levels it can work work on the individual level but some content also works on the social level because it's the kind of thing that we're proud to share with our friends and so on the campaign we decided to test this with our content we used hypothesis testing techniques we use AB testing to look at positive content about President Obama and negative content about his Challenger and what we found was that more often than not people in our generation would actually share the positive content and so even if traditionally the negative content
it's worked on the individual level in mailers radio advertisements and television where you have no choice but to consume it it might not work as well on the social level because we don't want to project this negative image of ourselves but the positive content worked on both levels our supporters were passionate about it and also proud to share it with their friends the campaigns are using these kinds of analytical techniques every single day to decide what kind of political discourse we're going to have and that puts you and I it puts our generation at the
epicenter of this fast powerful and responsive feedback loop the likes of which we've never seen in politics before and that means that we have a real responsibility we have a responsibility to give our Representatives the kind of feedback that reflects the voices that have been silenced and that are being silenced so our new political microphone it lets us do these these great big things like change what the internet's all about but it also lets us do these smaller and equally important things like decide what kind of day-to-day political discourse we want and of course comments
and clicks there are no substitute for volunteers and vot but what a lot of people in the generation above us don't seem to understand is that these two worlds the online world and the real world they're not these disperate disconnected things that live parallel to one another when Ashan gave that speech to a couple hundred people he wasn't just giving it to them he was giving it to the hundreds of thousands of people who would watch it on social media and when our supporters engaged with the campaign that engagement didn't stop online it it led
to 1.5 very real million voter registrations and it led to a higher youth voter turnout than in the previous election which also happened in this country not so long ago and so what that means is that these worlds are inextricably linked to one another that they're connected somehow and that we have control on both ends which means that we shouldn't feel so voiceless anymore we shouldn't feel so isolated anymore we shouldn't see feel so powerless anymore we shouldn't let others silence us anymore we should speak out and we should send a strong message that we
that our generation believes that together we might one day be able to bridge that gap between the politics that is and the politics that can be and whenever I feel cynical about that notion I think of these two images I think about Ashan Johnson standing behind that Podium holding on to that microphone I think about the hundreds the thousands of people who told him that he could change the future of politics and I think about an example from my own life the day after the election at Campaign Headquarters when President Obama came cried in front
of us hugged Ed every single one of us I was 20 years old at the time everyone in that office was in their 20s and 30s and he told us that we that our generation that you and I that millions of voices across the world that maybe one day we could change politics too thank you
