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= Emilie Smith (Activist) = Emilie Smith is an eighteen-year-old senior from Coconut Creek, Florida which is in Broward County. She currently attends North Broward Preparatory School and is set to graduate in May 2018. Following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018, Smith stepped up as an active voice in the March for Our Lives and #NeverAgain movements.

Social Media
Smith often takes to social media platforms to share her ideas and encourage others to do the same, her most-used platform being Twitter. In an interview she states that her biggest piece of advice to other teens and young adults who seek to make a difference is to “start by speaking to your friends, posting on social media, and organizing a group of people who want to see a change in the world.” In the first few weeks following the Parkland shooting, her personal Twitter account has gained over 25,000 followers, and she has even become “Twitter Verified.”

Benefit Concert
Smith has begun to organize and promote a benefit concert to support the families of the Parkland shooting victims. She took to Twitter on February 23rd, just one week after the shooting, to share her ideas about the benefit concert, and to ask her followers to help get her in contact with any musical artists that may be willing to get involved. Later that same week, she tells MTV in an interview that “I really into music. I like to sing. I play the piano and guitar. So, my whole life, I've really relied on music to find stability and healing, and that's been a huge part of my life. So, I thought about it. I said, well, why don't we have a concert for this community? Why don't we use music the way it's helped me?"

Peaceful Protests
Smith has participated in several peaceful protests, including the March for our Lives in Washington D.C. on March 24th, 2018 and a protest at the Florida Capitol in Tallahassee on February 20th. As she partakes in these events, she regularly updates her Twitter feed with photographs and information as a way to allow those who are unable to make it to the events in person can still support the cause through social media platforms.

Price On Our Lives
Smith has also been a huge proponent of the “Price on Our Lives” movement, in which students led by those at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have calculated the total amount of funds the senators of each state have received from the NRA, divided by the total number of students in the state to be a representative number of the value that the U.S. government places on each individual students’ lives. For Florida students, these price tags read $1.05, with other states valuing students at anywhere between $0.32 in Mississippi and “priceless” for those states that do not accept money from the NRA, such as Massachusetts and Hawaii.

Attacks and Conspiracy Theories
Since the high school activists began to speak out against gun violence, there has been great controversy concerning the authenticity of these students’ voices. Several people on the alt-right claimed the students were crisis actors hired by Liberals to manipulate the audience and promote gun control. Smith in particular faced a lot of backlash from those on the opposition due to the fact that she is one of the main student activists that arose out of the MSD shooting, despite never attending that school. In response to the backlash, Smith released a video via Twitter that has since been deleted, where she explains that she goes to a nearby school and has been personally impacted by gun violence in a previous situation several years ago and that is why she is so invested in the cause.

Personal Life
Smith describes herself as an “Activist, Bi, Artist,” according to her personal biography on her Twitter profile. Although the majority of her Tweets are devoted to gun control activism, also uses her platform to share her personal artwork and sexual orientation. In one particular Tweet, she combines activism with sexuality when she writes that she is “gay and taking down the NRA.”