The medium is the message
How text-based social media accelerated Wokeness, and how video and Elon are hastening its death.
Much has been written by others about the importance of mainstream media, law, and academia in the rise of Woke. This is a small contribution to the role played by social media.
“Define Woke!”
Wokeness is usually defined in neutral terms as “being alert to social injustice and discrimination”. One of its key features is a tendency to believe that social inequality is caused by discrimination by a happy majority against an unhappy minority and never by some property endogenous to the unhappy minority. For example the high attempted suicide rate of transgender people is blamed on transphobia and not on high rates of pre-existing mental illness. The high murder rate among black Americans is blamed on past and present white racism and never on some facet of black culture.
Another key feature of wokeness is that the lived experience of oppressed minorities is taken at face value as a kind of “ground truth”. Lived experience shouldn’t be doubted or minimised, and where another source of evidence contradicts lived experience it is assumed that the lived experience is correct.
Text based social media - Tumblr, Reddit, and Twitter
Text is the perfect medium for wokeness because it allows for the transmission of ideas and lived experience stripped from contextual cues humans rely on to tell whether someone is honest, sane or reasonable. Without facial expressions, vocal pitch or physical appearance to go on it’s far easier for insane people to launder their mad opinions (shh!) than it would be in than a face-to-face interaction or a video monologue. The mechanisms which social media sites use for deciding which content is prominent, hidden, banned or deleted are also essential in understanding how these sites accelerated wokeness.
Reddit (launched 2005)
A mostly text based social media site which functions as a network of communities (subreddits) dedicated to a particular topic or interest. Each subreddit is governed by volunteer moderators and posts and comments can be upvoted or downvoted to increase or decrease their visibility on the site. Moderators have the power to delete posts, ban users and set content policies. A highly active minority of woke moderators governs a large number of the most popular subreddits. Moderation combined with the upvote/downvote mechanism tends to create a “hive mind” within each sub where dissenting opinions are downvoted and hidden and eventually dissenters give up on posting altogether.
Reddit’s leadership also enforces an increasingly woke site wide content policy which created explicit rules in 2018 to favour protected minorities and ban certain forms of speech. Following the new content policy popular conservative subs like r/TheDonald were banned. Woke activists liase with Reddit leadership through subreddits like r/AgainstHateSubreddits to enforce the site wide rules against any offending subreddits which spring up. When a woke moderator takes over a subreddit sometimes a new splinter subreddit will be formed with the prefix “real” or “actual”. This new sub will grow in an anti-Woke direction until it is eventually banned for breaking the site-wide rules.
Twitter and Tumblr (launched 2007)
On Twitter users can favourite and retweet posts to increase their visibility on the site but can not downvote. Since retweets (reblogs on Tumblr) could signal agreement or “get a load of this idiot!” they create a ratchet mechanism where controversial shareable content bubbles to the surface regardless of how many users disagree with it. Like Reddit Twitter also adopted an increasingly woke content policy which peaked in the late 2010’s under “Parag’s reign of terror” where Parag Agrawal became CTO then CEO. During the terror gender critical feminists were banned for simply expressing their opinions and Donald Trump was exiled. The combination of a ratchet effect for controversial Woke tweets with the banning of controversial anti-Woke tweets tipped the scales heavily in favour of woke takeover.
Timeline of a Takeover
The before times (pre-2008)
If you’re over 30 you will have a hazy recollection of a time before Woke. Where popular culture was irreverent bordering on cruel. TV invited us to look at gross-out “embarrassing bodies” and “fat families”. In this clip from 2008 mainstream comedians joke about a pregnant trans man being an abomination.
The rise of Woke (2009-2014)
The release of the first iphone in 2007 combined with the aforementioned social media sites and ubiquitous fast wireless internet to change the way we live. The internet had been part of most of our lives for a decade but “online” was something you did at your computer rather than something you were. In these early days Wokeness gained a foothold among online elites and those at top universities. Crucially though it still competed for online attention in a largely lawless social media landscape. As late as 2014 there was a subreddit dedicated to sharing anti-black racism called “Coontown” and subreddits for “jailbait” and “creepshot” photos were popular before their eventual ban. Twitter was a place for discussing checking your privilege and White fragility but also a place for people with Swastika profile pictures to discuss White Supremacy.
The Woke takeover and Peak Woke (2015-2022)
As online elites became swayed by Woke ideas the content moderation policies of social media sites became increasingly censorious. At first only the most egregious racist content was banned but towards the end of the 2010’s new content policies on Twitter and Reddit made explicit reference to “protected characteristics” and popular TERF subreddits like r/GenderCritical were banned along with subs dedicated to politically incorrect humour like r/CringeAnarchy and r/CumTown which mocked SJWs. Video sharing site Youtube followed a similar trajectory toward ever increasing censorship. Huge right wing accounts like Ab Workout Guy and Donald Trump were banned from Twitter.
Elon and Tiktok fight back (2022 onwards)
In the early 2020’s it seemed as though Woke would rule forever. Only a minority of users cared about Reddit and Twitter’s new content regime. Attempts to create explicitly “free speech” alternatives like Parler and Gab resulted in low quality racist cesspits which Apple and Google refused to platform on their App Stores.
Two unexpected saviours arrived: one from Africa and one from China. Billionaire Elon Musk decided to buy the financially ailing Twitter with the explicit goal of ending Wokeness by restoring a level playing field in content moderation. Short viral video sharing site Tiktok (with fairly lax content moderation) enjoyed a huge rise in popularity. Both platforms now carry edgy content from the right and mockery of Woke sacred cows. Twitter now shows far more video content than ever before, and woke Shibboleths are far less convincing over video. A compelling reddit post about a transwoman’s awful experience of discrimination at a fast food restaurant could garner many updoots, but a TikTok video of the encounter is less convincing.
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As we move from consuming mostly censored text to consuming a mixture of video and uncensored text the cultural climate will continue to shift against Wokeness and back towards the irreverence which characterised the pre-Woke era.