Meet ‘Fernie Sanders,’ UCSB’s Socially Conscious TikTok Star

Third-year UC Santa Barbara student Fernando Tercero has gained popularity and a large following on TikTok through creating interactive videos centered around equity, accessibility, and community participation.

Tercero, known as @ferniesanders2024 on his TikTok account, has amassed nearly 80,000 followers since he began making videos just over a year ago, and has gained more than 1.8 million likes across all his videos. They span a wide variety of topics — mostly centered on politics — and his most popular discuss issues like redlining, distribution of resources, and how systemic racism shapes our modern experiences.

Tercero’s most popular video series is called “Modern Day Segregation.” In it, he walks the viewer through different areas of Isla Vista, Goleta, and his own home town of Palo Alto, and demonstrates how areas populated predominantly by lower-income residents and people of color have fewer public spaces, less accessible roads and sidewalks, and fewer community resources than their predominantly white-populated counterparts.