![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4chan And Social Justice?
Nov. 13th, 2026 05:22 amOne thing I wonder about is how the visibility of really intense, openly contemptuous amd hateful speech towards marginalized groups in a lot of online contexts and the general edgy shock humor during this time period shaped people's support for social justice at a time when a lot of more mainstream Democrat voters were preferring a more "color blind" approach or seeing the moment as post-tacism. Like, it seems like a lot og social justice people were extremely online and thus exposed to a lot of the hostile speech on 4chan etc. or even taking part in it themselves, which made it harder to accept a narrative that "nobody cares about race/gender/whatever anymore, let's all just focus on people".
I was easily sold on "some people hate minorities" because middle school me was a channer who kind of stepped around a lot of denigration of various groups like they were stepping around poop on the sidewalk. But I assume that a lot of people without exposure to that kind of "extreme" speech had a very different sense of how much overtime bigotry people engaged in. And of course, for people who did engage in edgy humor or intentionally hostile speech towards minorities (of course the lines were blurred because this was the zenith of "dude it's just a joke lol"), there was often a moment of "oh shit, I just went along with that" and the desire to atone for it by committing to social justice education and activism, which offered some pretty visible models of Not Doing That Anymore and new norms for how to operate.
There's a tangent here where a lot of channers had this sort of cynical post-morality shtick of like, it's bad to care about people in general (exemplified in charming terms like moralf*g), and hilarious to make fun of other people for suffering and the general culture's sentimentality around that (see the memes about people who committed suicide). So social justice communities were some of the first communities who I saw really aggressively pushing "yeah you should care about people who are suffering, Jesus Christ" and that gave me this feeling of validation for a lot of my moral intuitions and an alternative to the edgelord disaffected shtick. On the other hand though, I eventually learned that while a lot of people involved did have social causes they were passionate, there were a lot of blindspots in online social justice communities and the culture could be pretty okay with cruelty against the right targets. This is... common among human beings of course, but it is an exceedingly awkward look for a subculture that was interested in seeing itself as "having basic decency and compassion". And I wpuld argue that a lot of online social justice circles weren't just exhibiting the same selective empathy as most human beings, but also rewarding people for acting aggressively towards their perceived enemies. Some of the most aggressive, unhinged behavior I've ever seen was from social justice-y Tumblr users; a lot of the behavior was reminiscent of the level of hingedness my dad gets at the nadir of a manic episode.
(That said, that doesn't mean that social justice subcultures were actually more aggressive and cruel than other extremely online political subcultures. Just because these examples are available to me doesn't mean that I somehow have access to The Data about patterns of harassment. The 4chan people I described above also had a flourishing subculture of harassing people and negging you for worrying about them.)
There were also a lot of people who were interested in Upholding The Rules but had a sort of inflexible approach and would get Inspector Javert levels of obsessed with specific transgressors.
I was easily sold on "some people hate minorities" because middle school me was a channer who kind of stepped around a lot of denigration of various groups like they were stepping around poop on the sidewalk. But I assume that a lot of people without exposure to that kind of "extreme" speech had a very different sense of how much overtime bigotry people engaged in. And of course, for people who did engage in edgy humor or intentionally hostile speech towards minorities (of course the lines were blurred because this was the zenith of "dude it's just a joke lol"), there was often a moment of "oh shit, I just went along with that" and the desire to atone for it by committing to social justice education and activism, which offered some pretty visible models of Not Doing That Anymore and new norms for how to operate.
There's a tangent here where a lot of channers had this sort of cynical post-morality shtick of like, it's bad to care about people in general (exemplified in charming terms like moralf*g), and hilarious to make fun of other people for suffering and the general culture's sentimentality around that (see the memes about people who committed suicide). So social justice communities were some of the first communities who I saw really aggressively pushing "yeah you should care about people who are suffering, Jesus Christ" and that gave me this feeling of validation for a lot of my moral intuitions and an alternative to the edgelord disaffected shtick. On the other hand though, I eventually learned that while a lot of people involved did have social causes they were passionate, there were a lot of blindspots in online social justice communities and the culture could be pretty okay with cruelty against the right targets. This is... common among human beings of course, but it is an exceedingly awkward look for a subculture that was interested in seeing itself as "having basic decency and compassion". And I wpuld argue that a lot of online social justice circles weren't just exhibiting the same selective empathy as most human beings, but also rewarding people for acting aggressively towards their perceived enemies. Some of the most aggressive, unhinged behavior I've ever seen was from social justice-y Tumblr users; a lot of the behavior was reminiscent of the level of hingedness my dad gets at the nadir of a manic episode.
(That said, that doesn't mean that social justice subcultures were actually more aggressive and cruel than other extremely online political subcultures. Just because these examples are available to me doesn't mean that I somehow have access to The Data about patterns of harassment. The 4chan people I described above also had a flourishing subculture of harassing people and negging you for worrying about them.)
There were also a lot of people who were interested in Upholding The Rules but had a sort of inflexible approach and would get Inspector Javert levels of obsessed with specific transgressors.
