Over the last few days, as social media echoed with protest slogans and photographs of students holding witty, satirical, and unflinchingly direct placards against the National Testing Agency’s (NTA) repeated paper leaks, a new strain of audiovisual satire began making the rounds online. And Gen Z is emerging as the leaders of this new wave.
While social media platforms are often associated with trending audios, memes, short-form videos, and carefully curated glimpses of people’s lives that evoke a sense of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), Gen Z — the generation at the forefront of creating and amplifying this content — has effortlessly repurposed Instagram’s visual language into a powerful tool for protest.
The language of the content remains the same; only its purpose has shifted, transforming entertainment into satire and dissent. For instance, they are posting “fit checks” from protest sites, complete with goggles worn to shield themselves from tear gas; sharing Strava screenshots tracking the distance they ran while fleeing police during a lathi charge; pairing videos of themselves escaping officers with the Subway Surfers soundtrack and captioning them “Subway Surfers cardio with friends”; dressing up as superheroes; playing cricket against the barricades, and using viral couple-question audio templates such as “Who was interested first?” or “Who’s more protective?”, while pointing to police officers standing in the back. The result is a stream of protest content that is humorous, sarcastic, and unmistakably political.
Haarika, a Gen Z freelance designer from Chennai, feels like she is getting updates from her “friends who are there” instead of the protestors at Jantar Mantar. She adds, “Communicating facts can sometimes be tricky, but Gen Z is able to do it flawlessly while being authentic.”
Another Gen Z, under conditions of anonymity, shares, “Not every arm of the protest has to be logical, brutal, and slogan bearing. It can be wittifully satirical,” adding, “The cartoonists of newspapers are revered because of their wit, jester-like character, and the ability to convey a message and make it memorable with very less brutality shown. Now that social media is democratised, I see no difference in Gen Z’s wit, satire, and the ability to convey a message and educate people. To me, they are the cartoonists of modern India and their reels and messages are for the common man.”
Archanaa Seker, a city-based researcher, admits to having been monitoring these trends. She points out, “Social media seems to have been at the very core of getting the word out about this protest…In the age of social media, you can’t really hide the truth because everybody is somebody with the ability to document and share the same. At this protest, I think for each cop armed with a gun or with a lathi, there were four people armed with phones.”
While some may dismiss these posts and reels as content chasing, or interpret Gen Z’s style of protest as ‘casual’, their impact is hard to overlook. Since we are exposed to an endless stream of devastating news, often experiencing distant events with an immediacy that feels deeply personal, Archanaa believes that the ability to find humour in these disturbing times is what is resonating with the audiences. “I think the young people have totally cashed in on all technology, platforms, and everything available to them to do precisely that,” she notes.
Damo, a politically aware citizen participating at the protest in Chennai, corroborates, “Every conversation is political, whether you exercise the freedom to speak about politics, choose to hide from it, or pretend it does not exist. Any conversation about politics that is not attacking or hurting another person, or group of people, is a successful conversation.”
The creativity of these posts have even sparked a sense of missing out among those watching from afar, reflecting how protest itself has become part of a shared digital experience.
Haarika, meanwhile, shares how the Gen Z has turned protest sites as the places to be, normalising the act of demonstrating for a collective common cause — something that activists have long been striving to achieve. “The normalisation of participating in a protest, I think, is the greatest takeaway for this generation,” she concludes.