After a horrific shooting that left 17 dead, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, is set to reopen at the end of the week. But when it does, 18-year-old Sofie Whitney, a senior, will not be in attendance. As she told BuzzFeed News from the living-room floor, where she and a handful of other students have assembled a makeshift war room, she does not want to return to school “until the federal government starts making some progress” on gun control. Asked how her parents would feel about this decision, she replied, “I haven’t really discussed this with my parents, but I’ll deal with them.”

In the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, the teenage survivors have taken it upon themselves to spearhead an impassioned push for gun control, at a time when it would have been easy and completely understandable for them to grieve in private. Instead, just hours after the massacre, 17-year-old David Hogg addressed lawmakers directly on CNN. “Please . . . We’re children. You guys are the adults,” he said. “Take some action . . . work together, come over your politics, and get something done.” Three days later, Hogg’s classmate, senior Emma González, delivered a fiery speech at a Fort Lauderdale rally condemning the National Rifle Association and Donald Trump. “The people in the government who are voted into power are lying to us,” González said. “And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call B.S.” Both appearances quickly went viral, creating a feedback loop that Stoneman students have readily fueled, giving dozens of interviews and making countless press appearances in a matter of days. And against all odds, they’re getting results where so many others have failed.

“One of the reasons I think the survivors’ voices are carrying so far is that they are, deservedly, just absolutely alight with anger at the fucked-up American calculus that meant their friends’ lives were deemed less important than continued access to assault rifles,” Laura Olin, who launched the Clinton campaign’s digital strategy and worked on the digital team for Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election, told me. “The fact that they simply can’t believe that we could have allowed this to happen—that the adults could have failed them so badly—has also helped wake the rest of us up from our usual sadness-rage-despair cycle after mass shootings. It’s made change feel possible for the first time in a long time.”

Their efforts have proven effective in part because they have an innate understanding of the social-media ecosystem. Digital natives armed with smartphones, they found it second nature to capture, in graphic detail, their own reactions and conversations with loved ones during the shooting, as well as after the fact. They’re well versed in disseminating their message on social media in real time, using platforms they’re already familiar with. Unlike survivors of Columbine, who came of age well before the smartphone era, or Sandy Hook, who were too young to speak out, Stoneman students have the means and the skills to share their message autonomously—no institutional gatekeepers required. “Two things that tend to spread on social media are anger and hope,” Olin said. “And these kids are helping to bring both to the gun debate.”