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.”

In recent days, Stoneman students have commandeered Twitter to spread their demands for gun control, where they’ve been critical of politicians like Trump and immediately responsive to attacks from the right. When Jack Kingston, a former U.S. representative from Georgia, insinuated on Twitter that high-school students in Parkland were only organizing with the help of billionaire donor George Soros, the students themselves were quick to fire back. “Hey Jack!” Parkland student Sarah Chadwick tweeted. “Just wanted to let you know that, yes! Us 17yrs really are planning a nationwide rally! It’s crazy what determination, and a strong work ethic can lead to! But I mean you have neither of those things so I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

For media experts following from the sidelines, there are echoes of the Arab Spring. “I think what makes Parkland different is the same thing that made the Egyptian uprising different from previous revolutions—that we could, and can hear directly from those involved, on the ground, without the mediation (and accompanying bias) of journalists,” Jillian York, a journalist and the director of international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. “We’re hearing directly from children who experienced the shooting, and survived it. Their perspectives are raw, and real—more so than anything we would hear through the filters of journalism and adulthood.” What the Parkland students have accomplished in such a short time in some ways reflects the utopian vision of Silicon Valley: bringing people together to create positive change, and coalescing groups with different voices around one movement.

The Stoneman student campaign also highlights how the feedback loop between social media and broadcast television can be hijacked, using one to drive the other. Their tweets have been picked up and broadcast on outlets like CNN and Fox News, after which they’re regularly booked to speak on these channels themselves. An innate ability to think in 280 characters, to deliver headline-worthy sound bites, and to counter-program adversarial media, has combined to amplify their message in a way that Obama, in the wake of Sandy Hook, was unable to do with hours of primetime coverage. Their self-styled war room comes complete with whiteboards and calendars to schedule press appearances and rallies. As Whitney told BuzzFeed, “You can’t just make change. You have to be organized.”

Right now, their calendar includes a trip to Tallahassee, where more than 100 Stoneman students traveled for a Tuesday meeting with state legislators to discuss changes to existing gun laws. A group of students will appear at a CNN town hall with lawmakers on Wednesday, and a core group will headline “March for Our Lives,” a nationwide demonstration on March 24 where marchers will demand that a comprehensive bill be brought before Congress to address the gun-violence epidemic. For them, it’s perhaps a stroke of good luck that the president is consistently glued to the television: over Presidents’ Day weekend, Trump reportedly wandered the halls of Mar-a-Lago, agonizing over the gun-control debate and telling guests that he was “closely monitoring the media appearances by some of the surviving students.” As Stoneman student Alex Wind told CNN on Monday, “I know he’s listening.” And if he doesn’t take action, the Stoneman students will pop up in the wake of the next shooting, and the next, and the next, gaming the system to their advantage until something gives.