Michelle Wanjiru is 17 and sits on TikTok's Youth Council, one of a small group of young people worldwide who advise the platform on the risks that affect them most: AI-generated content, cyberbullying, misinformation and mental health.
She got there almost by accident, through a family friend who forwarded an application in 2023.
What she has learned since then, in boardrooms and in her own community workshops, is that the internet's problems and the offline poverty around it are often the same problem.
"There is no policy creation for us if you have not even asked us what the problem is," she said. "Sit with us and ask us what challenges we are facing."
That line captures what she has spent the last few years arguing, to TikTok executives and to her own community: that young people, and especially girls, experience digital risk differently, and adults keep designing solutions without asking them first.
The clearest evidence of that gap doesn't come from a conference room. It comes from workshops Wanjiru runs every school holiday through her own initiative, Mind of a Queen, bringing together girls from Nairobi, Kiambu and Mombasa to talk about social media, friendships and the pressures they face online and off.
One conversation has stayed with her. A teenage girl, 15 at the time, told her she had been exchanging sex with boda boda riders to afford sanitary pads. She became pregnant. Another girl, 13, had been told that having sex would stop menstrual pain, because no one had ever explained periods to her.
"You are talking about a 13-year-old child," Wanjiru said. "That is trauma that no child should have to experience."
Michelle Wanjiru, who sits on the Youth TikTok council during an interview at Nation Center in Nairobi on July 6, 2026.
Photo credit: Evans Habil| Nation Media Group
A girl worried about where her next sanitary towel will come from is not thinking about her privacy settings. A teenager living with that kind of poverty is also more exposed to online exploitation and manipulation, Wanjiru argues.
"Technology does not erase inequality," she said. "In many cases, it amplifies it."
That is the thread running through her advocacy work, on and off the platform: online safety cannot be separated from the material conditions young people are living in.
Wanjiru's instinct for advocacy started early. At six, in 2014, she wrote to the national government, the Council of Governors and women representatives, asking for better healthcare systems for young people and inviting them to an event she was organising for the Day of the African Child, marked every June 16.
"The agenda was to get quality health care for children," she said, "and educating parents on the significance of good health care and the health care systems that were there at that time."
Officials showed up. It was, she said, her first sense of what a child's voice could do.
Years later, during COVID-19 school closures, she discovered TikTok, and then Instagram and Snapchat, though TikTok held her attention most. She wasn't chasing an audience. Like most teenagers on the app, she was watching dance challenges and keeping up with trends, first on a shared account with her older sister, then on her own from 2021.
"I was not interested in being a content creator," she said. "Most of the time I was just scrolling through TikTok, watching other people create content."
Michelle Wanjiru, who sits on the Youth TikTok council during an interview at Nation Center in Nairobi on July 6, 2026.
Her parents didn't monitor her closely. Instead, she said, they taught her responsibility and left the door open.
"They told me that if I ever felt uncomfortable with anything online, I could always come to them and we would figure it out together."
She thinks every parent should try that approach, partly because she doesn't think there's another option. New apps and features appear constantly, and AI is changing what "online risk" even means, faster than any parent can track.
"Parents cannot know every feature or every risk," she said. "But they can build trust."
When the Youth Council application came through in 2023, Wanjiru applied without much expectation. Weeks later she was invited to interview, and soon after that she became one of its members, alongside young people from other countries, meeting on weekends so the work doesn't clash with school.
What surprised her wasn't meeting executives. It was realising there were people, not algorithms, behind every reporting tool and privacy setting.
"When people think about TikTok, they think about influencers," she said. "You do not actually get to meet the people making the policies."
The council's agenda keeps shifting: cyberbullying, digital wellbeing, privacy, misinformation, and increasingly, AI. Wanjiru says the issues never really get solved; they just get replaced.
"I would not say young people's concerns are overlooked," she said. "The issues evolve every day. You solve one issue and another one comes up."
AI-generated content is the newest version of that problem. Convincing fake videos, impersonation, false opportunities and manipulated images can spread within minutes, and for young users, the risk isn't always obvious.
"You see AI-generated content and it looks funny," she said. "But there are people who make AI-generated content that can actually harm young people."
Michelle Wanjiru, who sits on the Youth TikTok council during an interview at Nation Center in Nairobi on July 6, 2026.
Photo credit: Evans Habil| Nation Media Group
One response has been better labeling of synthetic content, so users can tell what's authentic. But Wanjiru argues technology alone won't fix this. Young people need to learn to question what they see, not just report it after the fact.
Some of the council's work has already shipped as features: prompts to take a break after long scrolling sessions, meditation exercises for late-night use, and digital wellbeing badges that reward users for completing safety-related activities. Parents can now schedule screen-free periods for their children, see who follows them, and get alerts about certain reported content.
"Mental health has always been one of my biggest concerns," she said. "I wanted young people to feel calm and relaxed even while using the platform."
What she runs into at home
But it's the workshops, not the council meetings, that seem to shape her thinking most. Beyond the stories about period poverty, she says the biggest obstacle to protecting girls online is fear, not ignorance. They know they can block or report abusive users. Most don't, because they're afraid of what happens next.
"They are like, 'What if I block them and then they expose me?'" she said. "What if they find my old photos? What if I get cancelled?"
For teenagers whose reputations live largely online, that fear isn't abstract. Some also believe, wrongly in her view, that blocking or reporting doesn't actually change anything, because they've heard it hasn't worked for others.
"You cannot wake up one day and expect change to happen," she said. "Sometimes they come back months later and tell you they still didn't block the person because they felt bad."
Changing that, she said, takes repetition. Correcting misinformation, building confidence, and reminding girls that protecting themselves online isn't something to apologise for.
Despite the council seat and the international meetings, one thing hasn't changed: adults still doubt her.
"My biggest barrier has always been misunderstanding," she said. "Adults see a young girl talking about advocacy and children's rights and think, 'She doesn't know what she's talking about.'"
She's learned to stop arguing with the skeptics and focus on the people who listen, including the council itself.
"The TikTok council and policymakers actually want to hear what I'm saying," she said. "So I work with the people who support me."
Her mother tells her not to let her age hold her back. "If I was your age and I had that opportunity," she recalls her mother saying, "I would take it and run with it."
A council meeting in Ghana, where members met in person after months of video calls, reinforced something else for her: the specifics change by country, but the underlying problems, misinformation, AI, cyberbullying, digital pressure, look remarkably similar everywhere.
"Whether in Nairobi, Accra or elsewhere, teenagers are navigating misinformation, AI, cyberbullying, digital pressure and rapidly changing technologies," she said.
Having just finished secondary school, Wanjiru now plans to study law, hoping it will sharpen her ability to push on policy rather than just comment on it.
"I have always wanted to study law because I want to understand the legal systems that protect children and young people," she said. "Advocacy has always been part of who I am, and I want to use the law to create even greater impact."
