Social Media Activism Reaction.

My chosen issue to address was sex trafficking in Syracuse. Specifically, the youth in the the Syracuse communities are subjected to cohesion into entering the sex industry. When I was searching for causes to advocate for, I became extremely emotional learning about the statistics. I was also really motivated to act because children are being targeted on social media which is absurd because of how accessible it is to my peers.

Our performance was to create an Instagram page and publish statistics through video and edited pictures. My parter and I wanted to use it as a platform for people to check the page for facts. It was suppose to be an act of intervention because we did not follow people to gain likes as the conventional use for Instagram is.

I researched facts about sex trafficking among children bellow 18 years old, then slimmed it down to important facts our intended target audience ought to care about. Our target audience covered multiple different demographic groups. The first group was college students at Syracuse University. This would be reached through sharing the instagram page their our own private accounts. The second group was young Syracuse teens. The idea was that if a pimp with a fake instagram could reached young children, then so could we about warning them. We wanted to offer the children at risk with infromation on how to avoid and get help from professionals. Another important part to the instagram was letting the victims know they are not alone. People care about them and want to prevent other people from entering sex slavery.

Our performance was largely influenced by the #MeToo movement. Although the advocacy cause is different, the act of intervention was the same idea. I believe that the act of intervention was extremely successful. The instagram was able to reach over 3,000 accounts in 3 days. People were messaging me on Instagram to ask question what I was posting. I believe my idea shifted of the whole campaign shifted when strangers started to follow the account. It became an account fake agencies started to follow. Parent in the community also began to follow it. They want to know what is happening in their backyard.

#MeToo movement and how it spread across the world. An act of intervention that inspired our campaign.

A video on where we gained our facts about the rise of children entering the sex trafficking ring.

An example of our videos we posted online on the instagram @glitch_in_syracuse

An ABC special were we gained some of our facts and footage from.