UPDATE x2:
As you know, I’m a numbers guy, so in addition to being as inspired by the Stoneman Douglas students of Parkland as everyone else, I’ve also been fascinated by the meteoric rise in social media popularity by Emma Gonzalez, one of the core leaders.
Several of the other students have also rightly reached a tremendous media presence; the other three who seem to be the most prominent so far include Cameron Kasky, David Hogg and Sarah Chadwick.
Cameron Kasky first had his voice heard the very evening after the shooting itself, when he wrote an angry and chilling account of his experience a few hours earlier:
Nearly a million people have read my re-post of his Facebook account, and I’m honored to say that it was the first Tweet he posted after creating his own Twitter account (as it happens, I was also first person he followed, which doesn’t mean anything).
Kasky was also one of the founding members of the #NeverAgain movement as well as the upcoming #MarchForOurLives event next month...but he REALLY received national attention after tearing Marco Rubio a new asshole at the CNN Town Hall.
Kasky has over 233,000 Twitter followers as of today.
David Hogg is the student journalist who somehow had the coolness and presence of mind to actually interview fellow students while they were all hiding in a closet in the middle of the shooting itself.
Last week, Hogg became the target of an ugly, idiotic but highly-coordinated Conspiracy Theorist attack claiming that he isn’t actually a 17-year old Stoneman Douglas student but is instead a older actor from California. DOZENS of completely different people tweeted the exact same (verbatim) false claim...leading to the least-likely percentage of students being held back in history:
The good news is that Twitter as a whole quickly struck back at this insanely stupid smear campaign, mocking the Alex Jones crowd mercilessly. I couldn’t help but join in with my own entry...which I’m proud to say was greatly liked by Hogg and Kasky themselves and even Kasky’s father:
(I’ve scrubbed his dad’s account name since the account is protected)
As of today, Hogg has 329,000 people following him on Twitter.
Sarah Chadwick, meanwhile, hasn’t been nearly as visible in TV interviews and such, but she’s quickly becoming a favorite on Twitter for her snarky touch:
Chadwick has about 228,000 followers on Twitter so far.
However, as SemDem noted in another diary last night, when it comes to Twitter, none of the students has gone as super-viral as Emma Gonzalez, who gave the amazing speech at the first major post-shooting rally on February 17th:
Gonzalez also asked one of the questions of NRA shill Dana Loesch at the CNN Town Hall, although it was really Kasky’s exchange with Rubio which stole the show that time around.
Gonzalez didn’t even create her Twitter account until February 18th, which makes this all the more remarkable: As of 4:51pm on Saturday—just 6 days later—she surpassed the NRA’s Twitter following of 550,000:
But she was just getting started...because yesterday, at exactly 12:01pm, she broke Loesch’s 766,700 followers (I had earlier projected her to bypass Loesch at noon):
As of 1:40pm Monday afternoon, she’s up to around 975,000 followers. At the current rate, I expect her to hit the 1 million follower milestone by around 7pm.
Oh, and before anyone asks: According to TwitterAudit.com, about 98% of her followers are real people (at least out of the first 600K or so...they don’t update their database in real-time).
For comparison, only 92% of my own humble 25,000 or so followers are considered real by TwitterAudit (I haven’t a clue who or what the 1,800 “fake” ones are).
There are a bunch of other MSD students making their voices heard on Twitter as well; here’s some of the others I’ve seen popping up a lot:
...among others. One student in particular, Morgan Williams, cut through the crap yesterday:
Not all of them are Twitter-famous (yet), but they’re all doing an amazing job of rallying the country to their cause and not accepting any bullshit from the powers that be. Adults could learn a lot from all of them.
Of course, there’s a potential, paradoxical downside here as well...which Gonzalez herself addressed today in a brilliant essay for Harper’s Bazaar:
At the end of the day, we don’t want people to have their guns taken away, we just want the people to be more responsible. We want civilians to have to go through more rolls of red tape to get what they want, because if any of that tape can stop those who shouldn’t own a gun from owning a gun, then our government will have done something right. All we want to do is go back to school. But we want to know that when we walk onto campus, we won’t have to worry about the possibility of staring down the barrel of a gun. We want to fix this problem so it doesn’t occur again, but mostly we want people to forget about us once this is over. We want to go back to our lives and live them to the fullest in respect for the dead.
It’s my understanding that the students are scheduled to officially return to classes starting on Wednesday. On top of how emotionally difficult it is for any student to go back to their “normal routine” after going through trauma like this, many of these kids will also have to try and cope with homework, pop quizzes and midterms while also having suddenly become media celebrities.
I suspect Gonzalez’s wish for “people to forget about them” once it’s “over” is sadly unlikely; it doesn’t work that way. Ms. Tarr summed this up pretty well in her own speech, saying:
“I’M 17, BUT IN A MATTER OF DAYS, I HAVE AGED DECADES.”
The trajectory of their lives has been changed forever. They’ve already managed to turn their grief and anger into positive action; let’s hope they’re able to continue making a positive difference in the world while still maintaining some semblance of a normal life.
UPDATE: As long as this diary is getting some attention, I should also note one other thing, which I already posted about on Twitter the other day.
This is Cameron Kasky’s younger brother Holden, along with their father Jeff. Please watch the whole thing (it’s about 5 minutes):
As I noted in response to this video on Twitter a couple of days ago: