13 Feb 2026 | Africa, Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Features, France, Kenya, Madagascar, Nepal, United Kingdom
This article first appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Index on Censorship, Gen Z is revolting: Why the world’s youth will not be silenced, published on 18 December 2025.
Gen Z are in revolt. In Kenya, in Madagascar, in Nepal, young people are exercising their freedom of expression, taking to the streets and demanding change. They are at times being silenced with force, at other times with subtlety.
As a team of predominantly non-Gen Z people, we spoke with young people from across the world to better understand how they see themselves. How free are their voices? Do they have hope for the future? Are we all doomed?
We talked to a young man from France, who described the hate and division he sees online, particularly targeted at men, with far-right politicians using memes and AI-generated videos to spread or soften hateful rhetoric. Marine Le Pen petting cats, for instance.
He believes social collapse is coming. In a country like France, with its strong record of demonstrations, it is shocking to hear him say that protests make no difference. They are dangerous places to be, where police use weapons against those raising their voices. People are fed up, and politicians are out of touch. In his words, “the Boomer generation is fucking us up”. What is most striking is that he doesn’t feel he can say any of this in public. Politics has become too divisive.
He described a landscape where young people are struggling to even pay grocery bills, and politicians aren’t listening. At the same time, he and his peers are trying to find meaning, a reason for being on the planet. Their issues are existential. In the UK too, people struggle to get jobs, to meet rising costs, and to afford a home.
The same is true in Finland, where a woman in her mid-twenties told us about her experiences. She said she is scared for the future.
While her social media algorithm is full of lifestyle influencers and calming content, she has witnessed a growing conservatism among the lower age bracket of Gen Z on TikTok. Her peers are cautious about saying anything that might get them cancelled, while she sees a slew of right-wing views from those in their mid-teens.
Here in the UK, our editorial assistant (and resident Gen Zer) Connor O’Brien has seen “young men being pumped with manosphere content”. He approached a number of Reform UK voters, keen to hear their perspectives, but none of them were willing to talk to Index.
Students from Ukraine, Palestine, Afghanistan and Malaysia joined us for a round table discussion about why Gen Z is in revolt. They talked about the bravery of Gen Z, growing up in the wake of the Arab Spring, and the feeling of having nothing left to lose. That, they said, is how revolutions start. They too agreed – the older generations have failed them, and the world is going to burn. Why wouldn’t they revolt?
They described what makes Gen Z distinct. The huge step change in their access to information, the way they consume media and how they share their opinions. Through the power of the internet, their generation has been shaped by global connection.
They also discussed how it’s impossible to generalise for a whole generation. They’re right, and even the views we heard were only a small sample. The Frenchman does not represent all of France, nor the Finnish woman all of Finland.
A recent report for Demos by Shuab Gamote and Peter Hyman, who interviewed hundreds of British 16-18 year olds, demonstrated just that. For starters, the 15-28 age bracket (as of 2025) is simply too wide. They focused their research on 15-18 year olds as the future change-makers. They also designed five archetypes, which the young people they spoke with felt represented them well. They are the activist (left-wing, cares about climate change, deeply principled), the entrepreneur (believes in meritocracy), the critical realist (apathetic or anti-establishment, questioning of everything), the traditionalist (right-leaning, patriotic) and the connector (disengaged from political discussions and interested in pop culture).
The media and, if we’re honest, those of us outside the Gen Z age bracket, have made some quick assumptions about who is influencing young people today. It must be Andrew Tate. The news tells us this, television dramas tell us this, and we probably tell it to each other. But, according to Gamote and Hyman’s research, “Tate is dead.” Figuratively.
When they mentioned Tate in their sessions, students rolled their eyes. Instead, young people in the UK are being influenced by five key types of social media star: entertainers, adult content creators, news explainers, right-wing thinkers and left-wing voices. Gender is a huge dividing line, shaping young people’s views.
“Young people today are immersed in a constant stream of content,” they said. “Young people are not following one person’s ‘ideology’. They follow and are ‘influenced’ by tens if not hundreds of creators. Their feeds are shaped by algorithms, not loyalty.”
The students at our round table echoed this, describing an ever-spinning carousel of influencers, who hold their attention for a week or so. One spoke about the gentle path of breadcrumbs – first a funny video, and then a bait and switch to far-right ideology, or videos of angry people shouting at hotels in Epping which they are being pushed because they live in Essex. For the women, “trad wives” content had made its way onto their feeds.
All this is about a fight for the future; for the youth protesters, for the young men demanding patriotic values and for the powerful seeking to gain influence on the young. From the Millennial, Gen X and Boomer sidelines, it might look like that future is hopeless. But Gen Z have a binary choice. It’s all or nothing.
3 Feb 2026 | Iran, Middle East and North Africa, News
Just when you think Iranian authorities couldn’t get crueller, you hear this: they’re extorting families out of huge sums of money in exchange for the bodies of murdered loved ones. Under the so-called “bullet price” – a practice dating back to the 1980s – the authorities have not only exacted money from grieving relatives they have ordered them to hold subdued funerals and even denounce the dead. The family of Ali Taherkhani, a 31-year-old first shot and then clubbed by security forces, was made to pay the equivalent of $21,000 for his body. At his burial, condolence banners were prohibited and only four family members were allowed to attend against an entourage of armed security forces. Arina Moradi, who works for rights group Hengaw, said her family had to pay to retrieve her cousin’s body. Authorities also demanded Siavash Shirzad was buried in a remote ancestral village and that the burial took place in silence. In another case, the family of brothers Hamid and Vahid Arzanlou, two well-known entrepreneurs in Iran’s furniture industry, was made to pay more than one billion tomans (about $6,670).
This isn’t just cruelty for cruelty’s sake. The authorities want to make sure that the funerals don’t turn into protests, as has already happened at the funerals of well-known figures who’ve been killed, such as 21-year-old basketball player Ahmad Khosravani. Hundreds shouted protest slogans at the Behesht Zahra Cemetery in central Tehran when Khosravani was laid to rest.
But calls against the Ayatollah aren’t the only way people are voicing dissent. Once the extortion was paid for the bodies of the Arzanlou brothers, a third brother asked mourners to applaud if they believed the pair had been right in protesting. The mourners did just that. This more celebratory response has occurred elsewhere. Instead of sombre music and Islamic verse, as is typical at most Iranian funerals today, some are choosing upbeat music and dancing. The relatives and close friends of Mohammad-Hossein Jamshidi and Ali Faraji threw confetti and clapped. Women danced as participants re-enacted tabaq-keshi, a traditional ceremony performed at weddings, at the burial of 18-year-old student Sourena Golgoon.
It’s hard to hold onto hope right now given the bloodbath that has just occurred. But if the slaughter of protesters is done to serve two purposes – silence the actual protesters and scare off would-be ones – these defiant funerals suggest Iranian authorities have not entirely succeeded in the latter.
Another protester, Mojtaba Shahpari, who was taken to hospital with a leg wound, to later be found shot in the head, had requested to be wrapped in a lion and sun flag if he was killed. That’s the former state flag of Iran from 1907 to 1979, which is banned in the country today. Shahpari was buried in it.
27 Jan 2026 | Belarus, Europe and Central Asia, News
The final month of 2025 brought many Belarusians a rare feeling of joy and hope when 123 Belarusian political prisoners were released from jail under the terms of agreements reached between the USA and the president, Alyaksandr Lukashenka. The USA’s special envoy for Belarus, John Cole, also announced that further releases could be expected in the future. It is impossible to overstate the significance of this event for those who were allowed to go free and for their families. No one who has seen a political prison from the inside or even at close quarters could ever take a casual attitude to such news.
But the inherent logic of releases like this merits a separate discussion. The releases do not take place as a result of judicial review or acknowledgement of the injustice of prisoners’ sentences, and they do not represent the beginning of systemic change. For Lukashenka, the freedom of his country’s finest people – journalists, activists and human rights advocates – is a bargaining chip for getting sanctions against Belarusian companies lifted.
This is a long-established mechanism, involving dozens of consultants, employees of the administration and members of the security services. There are behind-the-scenes agreements and constant work on lists, in which some people’s names are crossed out and others rise higher in the queue to freedom.
Today is the birthday of Belarusian journalist Andrei Aliaksandraŭ. This is the fifth year he has celebrated his birthday in prison. Today he turns 48.
In 2020, following yet another falsified presidential election, hundreds of thousands of people throughout Belarus came out into the streets to peacefully demand honest elections. Lukashenka ordered the protest to be crushed. As the whole world watched, the attempted revolution ended with people being arrested en masse, savagely beaten, tortured and even killed.
Belarus is one of the top five countries with the greatest number of arrested journalists, ahead of Russia. Andrei was one of those who ensured the protesters were heard, helped arrested people access legal assistance, find lawyers, pay their fines and legal costs. Three years ago, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison on a charge of high treason.
Andrei is remembered in the UK. Not long before his arrest he was awarded a prestigious international grant and spent a year in London, working with organisations active in the areas of human rights and freedom of speech, including Index on Censorship and Article 19. He shared his experience of what pressure on the media looks like from the inside and its consequences for society.
His former colleagues have fond memories of him. “Keen to learn and receptive”, “a huge Liverpool fan”, “he really loved Belarus”, “great fun!” The news of his arrest came as a terrible shock to them, since Belarus, the country where he was arrested, is the last one in Europe that still applies the death penalty. Including for high treason.
Charging journalists under the criminal code’s article on high treason ceased to be an exception long ago. It has become one instrument among others which is used regularly to apply pressure on media workers. The article defines the grounds for charges hazily, allowing the authorities wide scope for interpretation, it allows trials to be held behind closed doors and cruel punishments to be applied, up to and including life imprisonment. And it simultaneously serves a stigmatising function by depriving an individual of moral legitimacy in the eyes of one sector of society. In this way, the accused or convicted individual is categorised as a “traitor” or a “spy”. An old, familiar, Soviet move.
For me this story also has a personal dimension. In my childhood I spent every summer at my grandmother’s apartment in the small, provincial Belarusian town of Novopolotsk, in the Vitebsk region. In that place, I was a very happy child. I remember the squeaking swings in the yard, grazed knees, ice cream, my friends, my bicycle, taking the asters which grew in the garden back to town from our dacha. For me, that place became a synonym for carefree happiness.
Many years later, I would receive my own political sentence in Russia. Eight years, for a song against the war in Ukraine. In that same year, I would hear Andrei’s story. And learn that he was serving his sentence in Novopolotsk. I would read that human rights advocates referred to his correctional colony as a concentration camp surrounded by oil processing plants. That, in addition to performing slave labour, the political prisoners are constantly confined in punitive isolation cells, that the inmates of this colony are beaten and tortured. That they are forbidden to wear glasses or use a walking-stick, that if an inmate suffers a broken bone or other serious injury, even as a result of torture, the chances of medical assistance are minimal. The wound is bandaged up and the inmate is sent back to the barracks, or an isolation cell, so that no one can see his condition. That men there commit suicide and die from neglected illnesses.
Andrei Aliaksandraŭ is in that colony at this very moment. I open Google Maps. From my grandmother’s old apartment to Correctional Colony No. 1 it is 13 minutes by car.
In that place Andrei wrote this poem, which his colleagues at Index helped to translate from Belarusian to English
When you look out through the bars at the sky,
It’s not bars you see but the sky overhead.
Yesterday’s bread smells of mould and loss,
but tomorrow’s smells like genuine bread.
You say: the sky is a trick of the light.
But the bars are the trick of the light, I say!
Because bars are a hashtag, just a habit, right?
And this is the hashtag trending today.
Yet the sky cares nothing for hashtags at all,
the sky has no thought for trends up ahead,
it does not feel the ground where our feet fall,
nor count the centuries and slices of bread.
The sky just draws clouds of cotton wool
over time – this is all that goes on really.
And the sky does not see any bars at all
when it peers deep into the sky in me.
The question that inevitably arises against the backdrop of the recent releases is: Why is Andrei Aliaksandraŭ still in jail?
Generally speaking, in such cases the answer does not lie in the details of specific negotiations, but in the logic of the authoritarian system. People who create broad connections, help others and strengthen independent professional communities, constitute a long-term threat to the regime. Their release does not yield any immediate political advantage and does not weaken the actual infrastructure of resistance. In this sense, the selective releases are not a step towards freedom, but a means of maintaining control by demonstrating a managed “humane” approach. However, as a humanist, I always greet news of the release of hostages with joy.
Having spoken with people who worked with him for a while in Britain, as I examine his photographs, I see before me a cheerful romantic, an individual who, in a situation of danger to himself, was not afraid to do the right thing, an individual who has paid for this choice with his own freedom and his own health. I am filled with admiration for him and want to do everything I possibly can to hasten his release.
Andrei’s story is only one out of thousands, but it clearly demonstrates that in today’s Belarus, people are not punished for their crimes, but for their profession and their solidarity. By definition, a journalist cannot be a “traitor”.
I believe that Andrei must spend his next birthday at liberty, continuing to pursue his profession, for a journalist’s work consists in shining light into those places where it is easy for evil to hide without it.
Translation by Andrew Bromfield
Read letters from other prioners of Lukashenka’s regime
