The reckonings that came with the pandemic shone a light on inequities in the workplace, says Ongele. “Because that's what's important, getting people off the app and doing something about it.” “Inspiring and mobilizing is the goal, even if that is going to get you 10 percent fewer views,” she says.
The algorithm loves those videos, some of which traffic in “climate doomism.” They get tons of views, but they don't spur action. Joshi is cognizant of the temptation to wallow in pessimism, and she says she fell victim to it when she first started posting terrifying climate change videos to TikTok. Next, they’re setting their sights on Amazon. After Starbucks, they spammed the Kroger-owned supermarket Ralph’s, which posted temporary replacement jobs after unionized workers there authorized a strike. Over the past couple of months, members have begun to turn their attention to the labor movement. The makeover also meant a broader remit, with content creators trumpeting issues from climate change to foreign relations. Launched in 2020, the group rebranded from its original moniker, TikTok for Biden, after the president’s inauguration. Like-minded groups are clamoring for airtime on their megaphone, landing Gen-Z for Change a White House briefing on the war in Ukraine, and a parody of said briefing on Saturday Night Live. Labeled the “progressive movement’s TikTok army,” the group has amassed a collective 540 million social media followers, garnering “more views than CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News,” as they like to point out. Joshi serves as the organization’s director of operations, Ongele as digital strategy coordinator, and Wiggs as a digital strategy associate. Ongele’s cheeky tone captures the style of a lot of the posts by Gen-Z for Change, a coalition of progressive digital activists. “It’d be a real shame if people used the website and let Starbucks know unionizing is good and they shouldn’t be firing workers for trying to unionize,” Ongele told her 285,000 TikTok followers. (She had coded a similar website in January to spam Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s critical-race-theory tip line with Bee Movie lyrics.) The trio began pushing the site out on TikTok and reposting across their social media channels.
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Twenty-one-year-old coder Sofia Ongele spun up a website, called Change Is Brewing, and populated it with simple instructions on how to use the script, which users could leave running in a browser tab.
Within two hours, Wiggs coded a script that would let users auto-submit a pile of fake job applications to replace the Starbucks workers, using a temporary email service to generate disposable email addresses. “That’s something we can do,” responded Sean Wiggs, a college student who studies computer engineering. “We could find the Starbucks applications there and tell ppl to blow it up w fakes,” she texted. (Starbucks told CNN the firings weren’t retaliatory, but the workers claimed otherwise.) The 19-year-old Joshi immediately fired up a group chat with two fellow union sympathizers. Starbucks, the supposedly progressive coffee chain, had just fired seven employees who were trying to unionize a store in Memphis, Tennessee. Elise Joshi was scrolling through Twitter’s standard rage-bait late one night in February when she saw a Tweet that galled her enough to take action.