Tumblr's FAKEST Story: The Tale of Oppa Homeless Style

this video is brought to you by curiositystream get access to curiosity stream and my streaming service nebula when you sign up at curiositystream.com sarah's ed i had a good day of tips waitressing for once so i gave a homeless man 20 dollars on the walk home there must be a mistake no mistake i can afford to cut back a little have a wonderful day suddenly a shrieky little voice rang out a pasty dude wearing a trench coat and fedora barreled towards me what the [ __ ] are you doing he yanked the 20 bill from the homeless man's grip slicing his fingers on the paper he stuffed the bloody bill in my face no no you worked for this money while he sat on his ass and jerked off you keep it you threw the money in my face what the [ __ ] is your problem [ __ ] listen to me you [ __ ] useless female i'm from new york city where the homeless have the decency to try and work for money whether it's shining your shoes cleaning your windshield or just doing a little dance on the street corner i once saw a man with one leg hop in a circle for hours and made six dollars and change that's the difference between a classy homeless person and a bum well this is my money i earned it i'll use it any way i like how do you get your money if you're so important i don't need a job because my mom gives me money a crowd had formed everyone was glaring at the scumbag and a few were even cheering me on you wanna dance you little brick everyone turned to see the homeless man racing to his feet to our amazement he began to perform a pitch perfect korean style dance homeless style the crowd erupted we all began to join in the dance save for [ __ ] who turned bright purple oh style i threw my 20 at the homeless man's feet everyone else followed suit tossing money at him a woman in a suit gave him her gold watch [ __ ] took off running while the rest of us danced into the night if there's one thing more quintessentially tumblr than kickstarter scams and buckwild catfishing controversies it's fake posts subreddits like r slash that happened that are devoted to finding and calling out made up internet stories are constantly sharing screenshots from tumblr and fake stories like this one made up by an anti-social justice blog who invented a bus full of trans people with matching t-shirts who go around beating cis people up have frequently become memes in and of themselves i mean mind you fake internet stories are a thing everywhere they're big on reddit too and basically everyone knows that like 90 of the stuff on the relationships forum or am i the [ __ ] are complete nonsense fake stories are fairly big on twitter too one common thread is people lying about their kids saying really profound stuff to the extent that it's become a popular meme to parody these stories by having fictional kids say increasingly ridiculous things but tumblr's fake stories seem to have a particularly outlandish nature to them it's not just my kids said some profound nonsense about wolves it's like we danced to gangnam style into the night and i met a cop and we're reading homestuck together under a shock blanket and so tumblr in particular has become really famous for these hilariously made-up stories this tends to happen for a couple reasons and the first is that tumblr is kind of a lawless wasteland and i mean that in the best way possible the website has virtually no moderation compared to say reddit because it's not made up of a bunch of tiny sub-communities with their own moderators there are teams of people who review posts that get reported but you do have to report a post for them to spot it they won't see it on their own and while a moderator of say a relationship subreddit might create their own rules and say obviously fake posts aren't allowed here there's nothing in tumblr's terms of service banning those you see they only ban very dangerous content like female presenting nipples even then they're laughably horrible at enforcing their terms of service so there's no one deleting these stories and people are free to post basically anything unless it's horribly egregiously against the terms of service or it's a woman's body and secondly compared to twitter another site where you can mostly post whatever made up [ __ ] you want the site is a lot more versatile there's no character limit for example and you can add as many photos to a post as you want which means people can get a lot more creative with their fake stories than they can in say a twitter post fake stories on twitter tend to be short little anecdotes like my kids said this or this cool mom egged someone's car which are dumb but just not as memorable as the kind of narrative you can come up with when given unlimited text space another thing you'll notice when you look at most screenshots of fake tumblr posts is what the screenshots actually look like this instagram account fake stories frick basically just posts made up stories they found online and like 90 of them are tumblr posts and when you scroll you'll notice that in almost every case the posts have the little line next to them even though tumblr doesn't look like that anymore so i'll talk more about this in a second but that's because those posts are all screenshots taken before 2015 where they changed the format of their posts from this format with the lines to this much more clean and easy to read format and that's because there was a very particular culture that tumblr embodied prior to i mean i hate to always bring up dashcon but you really can trace it to about dashcon times again i'll talk more about this in a bit but all of these factors combined make tumblr a perfect breeding ground for absurd funny and easy to share and mock fake posts but why are we here talking about this today well that fake homeless story from earlier oppa homeless style has become a staple of tumblr meme culture for several years now ever since it first became noticed on the website but recently someone discovered something about that story that made a lot of waves what seemed like a simple fake tale by a bored teenager about korean music and homelessness turned out to connect to a web of lies involving reddit clout years of deception and very strong opinions on dog breeds let me explain so the first time oppa homeless style surfaced online was in the form of a screenshot posted onto reddit on march 1 2014. i want to say right off the bat that the person involved in researching where this post came from was not me that credit goes to tumblr users sword cats blue side fan club and heritage posts they were the people who went back to look at the profile of this person in the first place and find out where the story came from the reason i'm making a video about this at all instead of just linking a post that someone else made is that i don't just want to recap the deal with opa homeless style which you can easily find elsewhere but rather look at why this happened and what it can tell us so thank you to those three people for laying this foundation so that i can talk about the site culture of fake tumblr stories and what it says about living in a society okay so almost exactly seven years ago reddit user mecca mewtwo posts opa homeless style the thread titled fedoradvillain shames woman for giving to the homeless gets 3 500 upvotes and the mods give it a quality post flare the top comment speculates as to whether someone wrote the post just to put it on reddit and debunk it someone points out that even if that were true 145 people still believed it and shared it unironically other comments are mainly making fun of our protagonist in the oppa homeless style story comments poking holes in the woman's story praising the person who posted it with comments like this is the greatest thing i've ever seen and emphasizing how baloney the story is make up the 435 comments on the post it doesn't take long for the screenshot itself to be shared to tumblr with people making fun of it on there as well oppa homeless style very quickly became a meme on tumblr and unlike a lot of other memes it had incredible staying power in 2016 tumblr user beetle drink or kramergate at the time made a post full of links to their favorite fake tumblr posts and shared the opa homeless style screenshot onto tumblr where it got 80 000 likes comments and reblogs lots of people once again expressed that it was their favorite fake tumblr story of all time because of how hilariously made up it is like the author seems almost comically detached from reality not just because the actual prose sounds like the kind of approximation of human speech you'd get by training a neural network solely on poorly translated anime fan subs but also because of the absolute brazenness it takes to post it tag it with things like fedorable and poverty and fully expect people to believe it come on we're talking a gold piece here let's see some action dance and given the 145 likes and shares in the screenshot people did it's over the top in a great way and it's perfectly representative of what the incredible era of fake tumblr posts used to look like and i think it's reasonable to say oppa homeless style got far more popular on tumblr than it did on the original reddit post designed to mock it it got way more comments and shares on tumblr and way more people were inclined to believe it was an actual fake story someone made up and not something someone made a fake account to post and share on reddit for clout so why is that well in order to look into opa homeless style it's important to look at the general culture of fake tumblr posts as said earlier tumblr is not the first or only place that fake stories online got circulated they obviously existed as early as the internet first existed because people like to make [ __ ] up whether it's for fun attention boredom or to affect people's opinions on something you really think someone would do that just go on the internet and tell lies i mean the episode that arthur clip is from is from 2005. the earliest i remember realizing things on the internet were fake was on this website my life is average it was originally a spin-off of the website f my life or fml which was like the web version of the embarrassing moments section in a teen magazine people would share anecdotes about awful things happening to them it's technically still around now though not a lot of people use it but at its height posts could get hundreds of thousands or even millions of reactions on them these posts once again very quickly devolved into the realm of fake the top post of all time on there is from 2009 and it's again clearly not real like yeah the first part is maybe plausible but the second part no human talks like that if you accidentally sent a text to the wrong person you don't use their name in an awkwardly stilted way it's obviously made up just looking at the top posts on there most of them are doubtful anyway eventually two university students who read fml realized that these were getting ridiculously over the top and made my life as average or mlia in 2009. at first the stories were designed to be incredibly boring like that was the whole joke instead of sharing over the top stories it was mundane average stuff like today i put my hands under the sink and then it didn't work so i realized there was no motion sensor just boring stuff like that there was an average word of the day that was literally just a boring word everyone knew but the site started to take on a cultural shift quite quickly first people would start posting random humorous observations and tacking mlia onto the end and then well it got turned into something very different from its original intention first people started sharing posts about more cool things that happened to them like oh this justin bieber fan really got dunked on and then people started talking about fandom stuff as it related to their lives especially harry potter and it very quickly became a den of over-the-top fandom stories still using the label mlia like compare this front page from 2009 to this front page from 2011. it also spawned spin-offs like my life is twilight which is exactly what you'd think i remember very quickly a culture sprung up around mlia where people in the comments would decry how mlia was no longer average and would belittle all the stories posted onto there i remember eventually the same like 30 people would comment on everything and eventually people stopped talking about the stories and just used the comment section as a place to hang out and shoot the [ __ ] it was the first real internet community that i ever really participated in and it sprung up from making fun of fake stories on a spin-off of a forum for fake stories there was someone called the batting fairy who would downvote every single comment and they were sort of a meme there was someone who would do an angry rant about any subject you asked them to and there were even spin-off facebook groups where people would add each other and become friends irl if any of y'all hung out on mlia in 2009 i and remember hanging out with someone named flying underscore turtle underscore festival y'all are my brethren and i'll always remember you k winchester mobile ocean something or the other hope y'all are doing well there's also not always right and it's related websites which again started as a space to share stories about customers being the worst a very relatable and true to life experience but quickly evolved into comically fake stories and even got published into a book which i actually purchased i know some of these were fake because their faq claimed it met a rigorous standard for fact checking because people kept trying to submit family guy scenes so when i was 12 i wrote an obviously fake star wars story to see if it would get through and they posted it and it's still up there to this day another great one pre-2011 was troper tales a part of tv tropes where people who used the website would post stories about their lives that were insanely comically fake and yet always seemed to be believed by the people who used the website if you try to go on the tv tropes page now they say it was found to be unmanageable and has been permanently removed from the wiki and yeah they're right a lot of them featured bullies being owned by nerds via facts and logic and also karate skills here's one where two teenage girls scare off a mugger by using big words and poking him with an umbrella the badass boasts page is a gold mine it's just people talking about how they scared off bank robbers or whatever with anime villain monologues also lots of weird sex stories just so many this place was a cesspit anyway in 2011 it ended up getting shut down after a divisive website vote which is probably for the best but it doesn't mean we lost a gold mine of content anyway all this nonsense existed before tumblr and certainly before any of these examples that i'm talking about popped up but much like some of these websites of your pre-dash on tumblr had a very specific site culture to it much like how mlia thrived on quirky fandom stories and troper tales thrived on unassuming nerds being bbc sherlock-esque badasses by virtue of their nerdiness tumblr fake stories had a few common threads that gave them a distinct kind of tumblrness the first is that back in the day pre-2015 they were incredibly pervasive and rarely went challenged by most of fandom tumblr i think this is largely just that the people writing and sharing these fake stories were very young a lot of them seem to reference a kind of adult life that most fandom tumblr users sharing these posts at the time were not super well versed in yet there's this one clearly written by and for people who know nothing about drugs in which someone puts weed in the school vents and the whole school gets high obvious [ __ ] to anyone over the age of 15 but if all you know about weed is from school assemblies and music videos you might be like yeah i believe this or this one where a girl gets called for jury duty and she pretends the bible burns her and a lady faints again might be believable only to a kid who's never been to one or like look at the one i referenced earlier where someone found out homestuck updated so they went outside and started screaming as one does and someone called the cops and then the cop was like oh my god homestuck updated so we put on a shock blanket and they started reading homestuck together listen pigs in a blanket are delicious but the story is obviously not going to be plausible to anyone who has met a cop for more than five minutes or who has had an adult job in general but it's just the right amount of quirkiness to appeal to a suburban white 14 year old who got the general idea of cops and shock blankets from sherlock and likes homestuck another theme in a lot of tumblr fake stories was finding out that adults in your life secretly share the same nerdy interests as you like your teacher using tumblr code words or making doctor who references on your tests or finding out your parents or grandparents are obsessed with the same ships as you another common thread was protagonists who would effortlessly dunk on rude people around them often with everyone clapping at the display of heroics before them these ones would typically vaguely reference progressive politics there's this one where someone's homophobic dad learns to stop being homophobic because he ships john and sherlock or this one where a girl effortlessly shuts down a guy complaining about the friend zone or this one where a girl goes to disneyland and is mocked for her weight by an army of children until the girl playing ariel tells them it's a drownable offense or one where a cop who talks like she's from a bad 80s movie arrests a guy harassing a girl on the train one where a movie bimbo is harassing a fat girl at the gym and gets epically dunked on or this one with god amazing dialogue this gamesy cosplayer teams up with a brony who's attacking girls for their weight and gets stopped by a japanese man in a ryu cosplay who speaks japanese to them tells them they dishonor themselves and asks out our protagonist this one really exemplifies the spirit of early tumblr because there's both the veneer of progressivism in terms of standing up against body shaming but also this really weird racist stereotyping of what the writer seems to think japanese people are like very early tumblr there's also this one where a guy is being homophobic so she goes up and tells him it's okay and he needs to accept himself and come out and he starts crying and saying how hard it is there's the progressive aesthetic but a kind of reactionary sentiment behind it generally speaking a sassy protagonist who always has the right comeback publicly humiliating a bigot of some sort is really the bread and butter of these stories so there's the fandomy nature of them there's the liberal-ish politics and there's also the vague representation of what the world looks like often from the eyes of a very young teenager ultimately these stories were often fantasies for nerdy suburban kids who had a general approximation of how the world works and mostly went unchallenged these stories were really really prevalent on tumblr for a few years this culture eventually started to shift and there was this kind of backlash where people would comment postbusters on fake posts by 2014 2015 people started to get older and more critical of these early fandom posts and a general sense of disillusionment with fandom culture also soured people on them again i think dashcon while not the entire cause of this increased critical cynicism definitely had an effect the rising prevalence of cringe culture also started to kick in people lost interest in fandom stuff which is normal but started to get deeply deeply embarrassed with their past selves and with anyone still involved in those interests so there was this intense culture of mockery surrounding fandom nerds springing up from about 2014 to present day and so a lot of these fake posts were kind of collateral damage in that that said there were equally fake posts making fun of tumblr fandom nerd types like this old blog say no to super hulk which is a blog titled you're a nerd and was all about how terrible super hula was made up a post about a girl who wrote an essay on john locke and published a fake post on tumblr saying her teacher said i ship it when in actuality the teacher gave her an f and wrote c like this is obviously a fake post written to make tumblr nerds look bad and the people who run the blog have since admitted they think it was fake but it's just great though a teenager making a fake post about another teenager making a fake post it's incredible my point being while the anti-fandom tumblr cringe backlash led to a lot of people beginning to mock and discredit fake posts they didn't go away they did definitely decrease in their frequency and absurdity though people still tried to make things up but blatantly fake stories usually didn't gain the kind of universal acclaim that they did back in 2012. don't get me wrong people still share made-up [ __ ] but it's usually not this over-the-top obviously fake tumblr content these days it's often just cross-referenced screenshots from reddit like this one got big on tumblr this stereotypical country mama who saves her gay son after her ex-husband kicks him out of the home it starts as a wholesome believable story and then the author keeps upping the stakes until it's very clearly a feel-good fictional narrative she emphasizes how she's just a simple country lady who doesn't know much about what she's talking about and then she's suddenly making well-drawn edited cat memes popular with 20 something year old gamers about her own life as one does with the precision of a longtime reddit user and then the husband was cheating on her all along and she makes him cry for hours and then she comes out as bisexual herself and deletes her account and you're like yeah okay anyway that one's less than a year old and got over 200 000 likes and reblogs on tumblr and some people are calling [ __ ] but a lot of people are talking about it like a wholesome feel-good story that kind of stuff still gets shared and believed on sites like tumblr and reddit but for the most part while more tame fake stories that reaffirm people's beliefs still get shared occasionally the cartoonishly obvious fake content a la oppa homeless style is generally mocked like there was this one from 2017 where a 39 year old woman is minding her own business and gets accosted by a teenager for shipping reylo and then her mom screams at her and buys the woman a crepe to apologize and that one got a little bit of sympathy but it very very quickly became a meme with thousands of people mocking this lady for her obviously fake post posts like that just don't get automatically trusted the way they used to or the one i mentioned earlier down with sis featured a cis guy and his friend minding their own business and then a bus full of trans people wearing matching shirts beat him up and sent them to the hospital that one was mocked by basically everyone who saw it so for the most part as people got older and wiser and also more likely to cringe at earnest fandom content tumblr's culture definitely shifted from believing these absurdly fake posts to delighting and mocking them and that's largely why oppa homeless style was such a fun meme for people it's emblematic of basically every trope to do with fake tumbler posts it's divorced from an adult understanding of how the world works but would fit perfectly into a kid's cartoon there's the ostensibly progressive but still weird politics and it's about a cartoonishly evil villain getting upstaged by a cool protagonist who the entire crowd supports it's like machine generated to be the perfect tumbler story and a now grown-up base of tumblr users who enjoy mocking those stories and recognize similar ones from their youth latched onto it people had a lot of fun with oppa homeless style and it's reasonable given what tumblr's culture was like for years that tumblr users were able to accept it as something that a tumblr user could reasonably post but then it all came crashing down about eight months ago a new tumblr famous blog hopped onto the scene i mentioned them briefly in my dashcon video as well as earlier on in this video but heritage posts is a blog dedicated to finding and chronicling old embarrassing tumblr posts from ye olden days usually these are ones that were really popular at the time and often got screenshoted and passed around a lot but got lost to time for various reasons it's a very fun blog to check out and a neat time capsule into what tumblr culture was like in 2012. anyway they started a fake stories tag with lots of fake tales from the olden days most of which again fit the mo of fake tumbler tales and then they started looking for the original oppa homeless style post not the reddit screenshot but the actual oppa homeless style post as it originally read on tumblr only to discover that they couldn't find it the original blog seemed to no longer be present and despite it having over a hundred likes and reblogs it didn't seem to be available on anyone else's blog either suspecting that maybe oppa homeless style was never a real tumblr post they put out a call to figure out the actual deal with the post after a lot of searching the two tumblr users previously mentioned in my video did some digging and it turns out there's no indication that the phrase oppa homeless style ever appeared on the internet before mecca mewtwo posted that reddit screenshot and that led people to go through mecca mewtwo's posting history and what they found was super interesting a whole bunch of those fake tumblr stories i told you about earlier were also posted to reddit specifically from this guy's account the one about the fat girl going to the gym and being mocked by a skinny antagonist and saved by a hot gym guy this guy posted that screenshot the one about the fat girl going to a convention and being mocked by a brony antagonist and being saved by a hot japanese cosplayer he posted that one too the one about the fat girl going to disneyland and being mocked by a ride operator and being saved by a hot disney princess also a mecca mew original i assume you're getting the common theme here the one about the girl putting her hand on the bible and making a lady faint that one is also from him which obviously made people very curious because it really seems like this guy is exceptionally good at finding over-the-top tumblr posts that don't seem to exist anywhere else so people started searching for the original sources for these tumblr posts and quickly came to find that none of them existed before mecca mu's screenshots and i don't even mean like this guy having a bunch of alternate tumblr accounts that he would use to post fake stories toby style i mean the screenshots themselves are all entirely fake looking through mechamu's post history it seems finally one month ago someone called him out on his [ __ ] causing him to say that he just wanted to make people laugh and seemingly abandoning his account it's worth mentioning that now he seems aggressively obsessed with pit bulls sharing regular facebook screenshots of pitbull owners being obnoxious or dangerous or irresponsible it's not a massive stretch of the imagination to figure that much like everything else mechamu posted these are fake is it possible that the only motivation here is maybe attention and maybe to create funny content as he says technically yes but looking at this account it seems as though something else entirely is at play here something more sinister than just a funny tale of a homeless guy doing a pitch perfect korean dance first of all it's disturbing how much of mecca mu's content focuses on fat people or more specifically fat women tons of his fake posts are specifically written from the perspective of a fat woman who gets accosted by a cartoon antagonist no doubt in an attempt to make us think of all the fat women protagonists as hysterical liars inventing discrimination for themselves like this guy wrote an insane amount of fake posts that we're supposed to believe came from hysterical fat women i actually decided to go back and count his original posts and he made no less than 23 fake screenshots purporting to be from fat women keep in mind that these took effort to doctor like look at this one which is again a story about a fat woman going into a restaurant and being cartoonishly shamed for it that took time to write and come up with and he made dozens of these even if we're meant to believe there was no intentional political motivation behind these which is very doubtful the intense fixation on making fat women look bad is pretty disturbing other groups that mecca mew seemed to want to make look bad generally seemed to be anyone focused on social justice a lot of these posts seemed to be about cartoon approximations of bigots showing up and saying racist or sexist things and then getting dunked on again the liar in the fake post is basically always the one calling out the racism we're meant to reinforce the idea in our heads that there's a plague of people lying about experiencing racism online in laughably false ways or there's this one where a woman is experiencing harassment on a bus and her cool lesbian friend steps in and saves the day again these people are supposed to look bad for making up this fake story he also seemed to really dislike atheists a lot of his fake screenshots involved specifically making atheists look bad whether it's the bible one or this one where an atheist is volunteering and a christian woman accosts her for no reason he also participated in a parody subreddit designed to make fun of reddit atheists and so making fake atheists to dunk on seemed to be an extension of that even the ones that aren't trying to make anti-racist people of color feminist women and gay people specifically look bad still have to include some digs at fat people this one features a racist woman falsely claiming to be kicked out of a store for being white and even then there's this reference to giving her child big macs as a snack this one that seems to be making fun of fake pro-life stories is the only fake story i could find that wasn't a dig on leftists or atheists or fat people of some kind these were also just a weirdly high effort in general this dude posted a lot on anti-social justice warrior subreddits like tumblr in action and this included stuff like making entire comics and drawings and claiming social justice warriors made them like in late 2013 he posted this comic here and claimed it had 300 likes on a facebook group so i searched it up and it doesn't [ __ ] exist anywhere on the internet the worst part is all the comments are accurately identifying how this person looks exactly like the internet's stereotype of a social justice warrior and like there's literally a troll face on their bag and yet on mass they aren't making the obvious connection that this isn't real or this one like do you seriously believe a fat person made this are you this absurdly desperate to have your preconceived views reinforced that you can't exercise an iota of critical thinking skills for this one he had to straight up write an entire poem in order to make a fake fat woman look bad this guy put probably hours of real effort into doctoring fake screenshots of social justice warriors doing various crap and the motivation is very clearly to make those groups look worse honestly oppahoma's style was one of the least egregious mecca mew originals which is probably why it got so popular but even the more innocent stuff like the bible one he added this fake moment where someone awkwardly insisted that women could troll why what's the purpose of that comment well it makes the person leaving it look foolish and gullible it makes the feminist statement look foolish that's the purpose so okay a large volume of cringe content featuring social justice warriors or whatever marginalized group it's cool to hate on comes from just this one guy i think it's doubtful that he was just following the clout and doing it for attention given his participation in communities devoted solely to making fun of fat people or sjws or banning pit bulls even outside of his posting fake stories about those groups no this was at least partly a concerted effort to make those groups look bad when i was reading that original post about how oppa homeless style was fake a lot of folks in the comments noticed that this is how a lot of anti-social justice rhetoric has always seemed to operate finding a bunch of edge cases that may not even be real and overblowing their danger and that made me think a little bit about this mechamu guy and what his internet presence can tell us about the formation of these communities in general note that i do not particularly care about this guy as a person beyond what he represents but i think what he represents is interesting all right so let me pivot for a second and talk about the skeptic community on youtube and its pivot to anti-sjw rhetoric i promise this is relevant and especially so because mechamu 2 spent a lot of time posting his fake content on r tumblr in action which was the entry point for a lot of people to making fun of social justice warriors despite the name it also posted screenshots from facebook and other social media platforms but it was ostensibly primarily focused on tumblr i say was there are currently just under half a million people subscribed to the forum and at its height it had multiple posts getting over 30 000 upvotes it peaked about four years ago when most of its highly voted posts were made and it accompanied a bunch of youtube channels that were largely focused on the social justice culture war a lot of these channels were originally members of the internet skeptic community an online community of atheists largely focused on dunking on random religious usually christian fundamentalists and pivoted around 2013 to 2016 to anti-social justice warrior content usually this took the form of opposing feminism and trans activism that they perceived as going too far but there was also a lot of mockery of hysterical people of color fat people disabled people and cis queer people channels like thunderfoot the amazing atheist repsion and generally the contention to folks way too fixated on hating furries given their own anthropomorphic rant sonas were foundational to a lot of this transition okay so a lot of folks have already analyzed the rise and fall of the internet skeptic community and the association with the anti-social justice warrior movement one particularly great video on the topic is by big joel and it basically analyzes a very specific moment in anti-social justice warrior history right-wing blogger blair white releases a video where she claims that many of her right-wing colleagues are just grifters in it for the clout as someone who has sincerely held conservative beliefs blair finds it objectionable that she's literally had the experience of being on a talk show with someone and having her co-stars flat out say to her face that they don't actually care about the topics they're about to discuss but that they're about to make a big act of it for television what was interesting to big joel is that people more or less believed blair but that claim didn't make much of an impact on the anti-social justice warrior community people agreed that many of their favorite youtubers were grifters but didn't seem to care much joel traces this specifically to the rise of dunking culture in the skeptic community basically a lot of the youtube atheist community in ye olden days was built around dunking on dumb christian posts and poking holes in random arguments sometimes this wasn't a bad thing like when critiquing religious homophobia but it does seem like people cared more about the epic owns than they did about the actual homophobia and a lot of the time it was largely just about establishing a community around those critiques it wasn't really about engaging with these folks except to lob sick dunks at them the critique wasn't for them it was for the enjoyment of other similarly minded people that had built a community of sorts around it and then that exact same mentality was applied to pop social justice especially in the culture surrounding manspreading and buzzfeed feminism and anita sarkeesian's general existence every single person who saw that buzzfeed video on manspreading had the exact same obvious refutation and just repeated it to themselves over and over again quickly treating the general body of sjws in the same way they had treated the general body of christianity the arguments they're debunking tend to exist not really as a body of work to be seriously engaged with but as in joel's words props to disagree with hence when it comes out that a lot of these beliefs on a lot of people's parts aren't sincerely held it doesn't really matter because the important thing in those communities isn't really the beliefs themselves so much as just the aesthetics of dunking on an unreasonable set of arguments i think this is more or less accurate it's a great video check it out that said i don't think this is the only reason the skeptic community took a turn into right-wing content i think this video accurately traces the similarities between the mo's of both communities but not specifically why feminism was the new target of these communities a lot of that also came out of a rising discontentment with marginalized groups in the skeptic community who began to critique some of the primary figures and were met with a very intense backlash this is especially the case with elevatorgate where in 2011 a few years before the whole anti-man spreading backlash thing happened prominent atheist figure and feminist rebecca watson made a video talking about a guy at a skeptic convention following her from a bar to an elevator at 4 am and propositioning her while in the elevator and how she felt uncomfortable with being asked out in a trapped space in a foreign country at 4am by a guy who followed her uh i don't really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable but i'll just sort of lay it out that i was a single woman you know in a foreign country at 4 00 am in a hotel elevator with you it wasn't even a video about that it was just an aside in a vlog and by god did the atheist community reign ironically hell fire onto her the dislike ratio on that video is massive richard dawkins made a blog post about how women in muslim countries have it worse and it was insulting to them to bring up her experiences and she received massive amounts of hate letters and threats for her video a lot of marginalized folks ended up leaving the skeptic community largely because of the way rebecca watson and other marginalized people who critiqued the community were treated leaving behind only the people who were not great to her elevator gate was a divisive moment in the overall skeptic community and showed a general defensiveness and lack of willingness to consider the unique experiences of other groups if it violated their own base idea of what was common sense the new atheist community started to decline for a variety of reasons including people just straight up losing interest and a lot of these bloggers started to blame the contemporaneous rise of feminist discourse with the decline of new atheist discourse to them people like rebecca watson were single-handedly responsible for tearing the community apart i think the fact that events like that already primed this community to view any feminist woman making any kind of suggestion that men consider previously unexamined aspects of their behavior as unreasonable and ridiculous mixed with the general culture of dunking on arguments that seem unreasonable and ridiculous really contributed to large swaths of the skeptic community turning to anti-sjw politics if y'all watched my not like other girls video you already know this but i myself was one of those people i was really into the skeptic community and was a big fan of watching dumb bigoted arguments get epically owned with facts and logic especially because i was really into lgbt plus activism for some reason and i witnessed a lot of the backlash to that activism coming specifically from christian fundamentalists so it was just a lot of fun and very cathartic to just endlessly dunk on those people when they said bad [ __ ] and then people started to share bad arguments about man spreading where it would be a picture of a guy on a completely empty train car or whatever and so when i was like 13 14 i very quickly also started to really oppose sjws because that was what people in my social circle were now talking about i still considered myself a leftist but i just didn't approve of those extreme feminists who wanted to ban father's day or that one video of the lady with red hair arguing with men's rights activists she's bad time to obsess over this one singular lady with no significant platform or influence for literal years it took about a year for me to be like wait this is pointless mostly because i started making friends in real life who were feminists and they were nothing like the fringe edge cases the anti-sjw internet spent ridiculous amounts of time trying to argue with and debunk and treat us broadly representative of the entire community still i had my year of being all like i'm not a feminist i'm an egalitarian i don't want to use the feminist label and align myself with these people it was so dumb it's like girl look at the people you are aligning yourself with come on anyway my point is i too have a history on the anti-sjw side of things so i can confirm that sick dunks on random posts online that seem nonsensical or bad make up a significant proportion of the community even just looking through old youtube channels at the time like thunderfoot or the army of folks with icons of household objects but with angry faces and crossed arms there was very little like making one's own positive arguments about the nature of the world or how politics should be conducted it was like here's why anita sarkeesian said a bad thing here's why the red-headed feminist lady said a bad thing here's this one randy here's why this is [ __ ] hell and nowhere is this more obvious than on our slash tumblr in action which besides that happened the fake story subreddit is where mechamu posted the majority of his doctored screenshots a lot of people who left the anti-sjw community after it took a much more evidently hard right turn usually around either gamergate or the 2016 election will repeat a similar line something along the lines of like yeah those communities were fine and fun when they were just making fun of stuff like man spreading and whatnot but then it became something a lot more sinister it sucks that it turned into something so dark when it used to be so chill and reasonable but like did it i think mechamu's contingent of made up posts that are supposedly from an army of hysterical lying social justice warriors tells us about more than just this one guy i think mechamu and all the opa homeless style adjacent tales are rather a broader case study into how these communities operated and in many cases continue to operate after seeing mechamu's posts i decided to check out tumblr in action for the first time in probably about nine years i went to look at some of the top posts and it was very interesting to me what the community fixated upon the top post of all time there was from someone saying if you are white you can't speak spanish and then our rational savior steps in to remind us that spain exists the comments are mainly people pointing out other countries that have white people who speak spanish as well as anger about how many people seem to legitimately believe this but like do they i decided to track down the original post that tens of thousands of people were getting so outraged about and this one is actually a real post the blog that made it deactivated three years ago so i went through a whole bunch of the notes and literally not a singular person is agreeing with the post it's a whole bunch of people dunking on them i did not find a single person in agreement after scrolling through literally hundreds of notes on the original post but what i did find were some old screenshots from the blog including this blatantly anti-semitic post here as well as a section where they misgender a trans person who responds to them as well as an addition where they said if you're spanish you can't speak spanish so this person is one clearly trolling two receiving absolutely zero widespread support from tumblr sjws and three a conservative this is a troll post designed to get people riled up about sjws it was never a serious threat nor was anyone ever seriously claiming white people should not be allowed to speak spanish almost like it follows the exact same mo as the mecca mu stuff here's another fake very deep fried post at the top of tumblr in action where a non-binary person tells everyone they're non-binary and the whole restaurant begins to clap everyone was talking about how obviously fake the post was so i looked into finding it and shockingly it's not a real tumblr post no one ever actually made this post see one of the main facets of anti-sjw tumblr was the creation of troll blogs that were specifically made to mock and discredit social justice people the most memorable example that i can think of was this post here where someone who is plantkin claims that owning plants is slavery and kidnapping and tens of thousands of people lose their [ __ ] over how they can't tell anything is real anymore it's like are you serious you're genuinely that incapable of identifying a troll this is not something to brag about it came from a blog called carrion flowerkin who claimed to be every single sexuality and also said they were a republican and trans fat which is not a thing except in food like that's fake that's a troll they literally tell you that they're republican and these posts would get tens of thousands of upvotes on tumblr in action and would get dunking videos from people seriously invested in proving the lie to you and if you pointed out that they were fake they'd be like well it's still telling that someone could believe it the fact that i was duped actually makes me more correct actually and it's like yes you believed this troll blog because you spent years in an insular community you get duped by troll blogs into hating other people so you make troll blogs about those people and you all dupe yourselves into believing these troll blogs until you're getting high off of outrage that you yourself have created like a delicate yet self-sustaining ecosystem that's not to say none of the posts on tumblr in action were ever real there are real posts even if for the most part they're literally from random nobodies who never got any kind of influence and aren't supported by the mass social movements that these users claim they are and there are even some genuine real posts that got some sort of real reach rare as they are i'm not gonna go as far as to claim that the entire community was centered entirely around fake content that said even the real content on there seems to follow a trend of mostly being from random accounts that aren't trying to seriously politically organize and are met with almost universal backlash i looked through a bunch of the other top posts and found essentially no examples of actual prominent sjws that posed any serious cultural threat to people the next top 5 posts in order included a random account with 63 followers telling the wendy's twitter not to assume anyone's gender and then wendy's says we're all dudes this person had no social influence and also didn't seem to be involved in the social justice sphere just following a bunch of sports accounts also they used a lot of slurs they were clearly not an sjw especially not a prominent one with any kind of reach or influence a random nobody on facebook saying they looked thinner in one mirror than another this is hard to verify as true or false because private facebook post but either way this is a random nobody and this post had no widespread reach or support nor was it really any kind of social activism trying to organize people from any activist that we know of they were just complaining that they didn't look skinny in an h m mirror and that they thought the mirror was warped this tweet about a guy drinking water and how it meant they hated white people i tracked down the original tweet and it was getting massively ratioed with all kinds of people getting thousands of likes making fun of it there was no widespread agreement with the post it reads as almost intentionally ridiculous and again isn't making any kind of broad social justice points so much as just some random university student complaining there definitely isn't at least a broad cultural problem of white people being oppressed or even bullied for drinking water out of milk jugs and this person again a random twitter nobody received intently more backlash than they did support a poorly written article about how some people have a mental illness that causes them to desperately want to be disabled and often harm themselves in the process it uses the term trans abled which almost no one actually uses and it's full of comments making the one joke and inventing backstories about how the trans community supports this community on mass even though this is not remotely a widespread thing and seems to just be a widespread misunderstanding of something extremely rare that has literally nothing to do with trans people an anonymous message from a singular person saying the original poster is a man with 300 000 people reblogging it to criticize it not only did this anonymous person receive no support here hundreds of thousands of people on tumblr are condemning them i have no idea if this is a real anon or that they just sent themselves that message but what's more relevant is that this clearly isn't an idea that's taken seriously even on tumblr and yet it's being used largely as evidence of a widespread cultural issue on tumblr i could read off every single top post from this subreddit one by one but the consistent theme in all of them is that the posts are generally either completely fake troll bait misinterpreted or they're from random nobodies who are most times anonymous blogs on the internet with no verified reach or proof that they were ever even real people at all there are some real posts with an actual reach mostly from news sources like vice running articles about random pop social justice concepts but for the most part all the top posts on subreddits like this are random facebook comments random nobodies on twitter who aren't doing any kind of serious political organizing and trolls a lot of extremely obvious trolls and that matters because like i said earlier it creates a straight-up self-sustaining ecosystem of this kind of content often people in anti-fake post communities were so desperate to mock fake posts that they missed obvious jokes it'd be like if someone was like a horse walked into a bar and someone tried to fact-check it i don't think a horse really walked into a bar because that would have been a health code violation you're lying for attention like take this post it's very obviously a joke and yet here's 2 000 people mocking the original poster for being a liar and this gets much worse when not only are people desperate to dunk on the liar but they're also constantly being bombarded with content to mock that reinforces their existing biases against marginalized groups it might seem ironic because the roots of this community largely was the skeptic community which was ostensibly based around being you know skeptical of things yet these people seem to accept without question that there's genuinely a plague of fat women making up stories about evil nursery rhymes or other kin who are going to call you a kidnapper for having a houseplant but honestly i think that's going about things the wrong way i think it's the very fact that tumblr in action and anti-social justice youtubers have their roots in the skeptic community that this was able to happen this is a community based largely around sick dunks and making the enemy look bad instinctively responding to anything new or suspicious with extreme skepticism of deception that impulse isn't always bad when it comes to responding to like pseudoscience or bigotry but as the aesthetic basis for an entire community it means that when they see something like opa homeless style the instinct is well to dunk on it to pinpoint every obviously fake thing in the story and bring it back to an internal community that exists entirely to do this god i have said dunk so much in this video i really want dunkaroos and i don't think they exist anymore and it's it's killing me that's not to say people never made up real fake posts about owning bigots with facts and logic or that no one has ever lied about experiencing bigotry ever in any context we know from that earlier section that fake content coming from naive kids was tumblr's bread and butter for a while but the backlash culture that sprung up from that was disproportionate to the real problem of made-up nonsense on tumblr and the fact that folks started making up fake liars just to call them out for being fake liars is indicative of that but okay why am i talking about this at all the anti-sjw community as it existed on reddit seems more or less dead now as people either got pushed far more right than the we're all about simple logic and reason mantra of the community purported to be or realized the whole thing was a sham and left entirely posts on tumblr in action get a few hundred to a few thousand upvotes now and it's mostly random screenshots of facebook posts blatantly fake posts or screenshots that are literally a decade old this post is literally from 2011 like yeah you really owned them so why bring up this community now well besides the fact that the recent uncovering of opa homeless style as this fake account got me interested again i'm not convinced the problem entirely went away with the death of the anti-sjw community let me explain [Music] the downfall of communities like tumblr in action seems to have coincided with the rise in a bunch of other communities that turn out to have a very similar mo despite ostensibly different purposes while tumblr's based growing up and half the users abandoning the website means less of it comes from tumblr the new base for blatantly made up content on the internet seems to be subreddits like am i the [ __ ] and relationships am i the [ __ ] initially began as a place where you could post your disagreements with people in your life and have strangers judge whether you're actually the [ __ ] in this situation it was kind of a neat way to resolve conflicts cracks quickly began to show though because it turns out that when someone is posting about a disagreement they had they're only gonna represent it from their own perspective very quickly almost no one was ever getting judged as the [ __ ] because well they only ever told their own side of the story and as the subreddit got bigger and bigger much like mlia of days of yore it went from mundane conflicts to absolutely buckwild [ __ ] first there were obvious validation posts someone acted in a way that literally no person could ever interpret as making them the [ __ ] and they'd share their story just to get internet points and hear people talk about how great they were then there was a rise in clickbait content validation posts with intentionally misleading titles to get the most engagement like the title would be am i the [ __ ] for punching an old woman in the face and the story would be about how the old woman was robbing a bank and our protagonist saved people a lot of this stuff just amounts to bad fanfiction which is a shame because at least my bad fan fiction includes an army of identical wenzler clones with a suspicious amount of body strength who bring me to a little cabin in rural needville where they all take turns [Laughter] moderators eventually removed the rule against validation posts and while there's a guideline not to submit made up content everyone very clearly does and it virtually never gets removed not only that but often people doubting someone's story will get their own comment removed just for casting doubt on it this seems fairly harmless at first like yeah okay people are making up dumb interpersonal [ __ ] for internet points everyone kind of knows on some level that it's a creative fiction site but the issue is that when you look deeper into the kind of content on am i the [ __ ] it starts to look really reminiscent of the mechamu stuff multiple times a day there are these blatantly faked am i the [ __ ] posts centered around a trans person doing something unreasonable a trans person told me to change my name because they used to be named that that one got almost 2 000 upvotes with loads of comments saying stuff like this is why everyone thinks trans people are unreasonable i mean technically that's true a lot of people do think trans people are unreasonable because folks make up lies about them there are constant trans posts about how someone tried to trans you or a trans person stole all your money and then called you transphobic for asking for your money back and they're all very clearly blatantly fake to anyone who's met a trans person but they're clearly not seen as blatantly fake to the tens of thousands of people who fall for them every single time there's also very similar content when it comes to posts mentioning autism on the subreddit the unreasonable autistic villain is a common trope on am i the [ __ ] posts it turns out the subreddit is essentially reinventing the stereotype of the hysterical minority from tumblr in action and everyone once again is falling for it fake posts about these groups create insular communities of people who distrust those groups and thus create fake posts about those groups which create insular communities of people who distrust those groups and the cycle continues on and on and on until the image people have in their head of a trans person or a person of color or a fat woman or an autistic person don't even remotely resemble anyone's real life experiences and as we saw from the rise in the anti-social justice warrior community that can get really bad [Music] what started out as a fun post that perfectly captured the wackier elements of tumblr fake story culture led into a fairly dark rabbit hole of fake content explicitly created to stir up backlash against various marginalized groups this backlash often took the form of the creation of even more fake posts until the entire community was an oroboros of vitriol against an almost entirely fabricated enemy with real marginalized communities directly in its line of fire these posts are often treated as fairly harmless when they don't go beyond opa homeless style-esque stuff i mean it became a meme on tumblr for a reason mostly because it was you know silly and goofy and fun but as we've seen from the stuff on places like am i the [ __ ] turning into another here's the crazy sjw i encountered today forum it's very easy for these communities to turn quite sinister especially when they prey on pre-existing biases people might have against marginalized groups a lot of that early tumblr content that was a bizarre simulacrum of adult life managed to get popular because it was made and spread by kids who didn't know what adult life really looked like and similarly tumblr in action and am i the [ __ ] seem not to be representing any actual existing issue that most people will ever typically encounter outside the internet but rather a community-generated simulacrum of what they think a disabled person or a trans person is reality is irrelevant because they aren't engaging with reality they're engaging with a villain of their own creation and they reward each other by creating more of it i don't have a perfect solution to this issue but i do think folks should exercise critical thinking in general when it comes to the communities they participate in if the majority of the stuff you're reading about any given group comes not from a primary identifiable source from the group itself but from a second hand story or a censored screenshot of a random facebook nobody it might be worth stepping outside of it i also think a lot of this responsibility is on people who create these communities to [ __ ] moderate them reddit communities at least ostensibly have what tumblr never did actual teams of moderators who can remove fake content designed to stir up backlash if you run a community dedicated to calling out fake posts it might be worth fact checking which ones are real fake posts and which ones are fake fake posts you get it fake posts that were never actually real and if you run a subreddit you insist isn't for creative writing use some common sense and don't let it be used for creative writing opa homeless style may not have ever been a real post nor were any of the other posts mecca mew created but the culture that sprung up around this kind of content very much was real i wouldn't be surprised if further investigations into places like r slash that happened revealed a lot of either people calling out obvious jokes or screenshots of fake posts it's suspiciously impossible to find elsewhere when that happens it's worth interrogating what preconceived beliefs those posts might try to reinforce even subtly anyway i'm exhausted from all these terrible terrible stories back to my once-ler fan fiction at least that one has enemies to lovers if you're interested in exploring future content about internet culture you can find lots of interesting documentaries on curiosity stream my sponsor for this video curiosity stream is a really cool streaming service full of fascinating documentaries on science history technology and society that addresses our desire to learn documentaries like the curious mind series on social networking explore its history in really fun and interesting ways exploring topics like the rise and fall of aol it's really interesting stuff and you can watch that and a lot more on curiosity stream not only that but if you want to watch a lot of cool educational and entertaining content and support me and lots of other creators curiosity stream has partnered with nebula to help me and tons of others make exclusive content only available on nebula nebula is a collaborative platform by me and many other creators like kat blaque tierzoo philosophytube and many others where you can stream high quality content some of which you can only find on nebula nebula is a really great way to help support creators because it lets us create content that might not be best suited for youtube because of copyright monetization or other reasons so for example when you sign up for nebula you not only get to watch my youtube videos early you also get to watch nebula originals like my exclusive video debater theater in debater theater i talk about how to better use arguments to persuade others with lots of cool examples like how people use debating skills in movies the news and even award acceptance speeches debating is all about recognizing other people's arguments noticing when there's verbal sleight of hand designed to persuade people and learning to counter those arguments which makes it a great exercise in critical thinking and makes you better at recognizing those tricks in the wild this video was of course about critical thinking and how easy it is for people to deceive others and in my opinion getting a primer on debating skills is a really cool and useful way to notice when and where it's happening and work to combat it when you sign up for curiosity stream you also get your subscription to nebula included you can get unlimited access to both services for just 299 a month when you sign up using my code just head to curiositystream.com sarahz and use my code sarahzinup that's curiositystream.com [Music] [Music] hey [Music] [Music] on top of a special thank you to all my patrons i'd like to specially thank vocallygranby eleanor bart and sabrina savale for joining my 20 plus tier welcome

Channel: Sarah Z

Views: 1,003,203

Keywords: sarah z, video essay, video essayist, internet history, internet culture, tumblr, reddit, twitter, tumblr history, tumblr post, fandom, fandom drama, fandom history, r/thathappened, tiktok, tiktok stories, tumblr stories, lindsay ellis, kat blaque, philosophy tube

Id: BiU7aGZ-o68

Length: 65min 25sec (3925 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TheProudBrit]

Ah, god. As someone who was and still is on tumblr and has been since, like, 2013 or so, so much of this rings true. As does the TVTropes stuff, and the MLIA and the like. Lord I was a gullible kid back then, though - thankfully - I only fell into the anti-SJW thing for a year max, and mostly in the "lol look at the crazy tulpas" on TiA. Still shitty, just not as bad as a lot of 'em.

Edit: Okay, actually, a fuckton of this is hitting home, both in terms of "I'm an egalitarian because of those crazy feminists!" and "I support LGBT+ people for some reason!! Totally not because it resonates and I'm too thick to realise I'm bi!"

[u/JohnWhoHasACat]

For anyone not sure about watching this, it is actually a really interesting look at the ways that anti-SJW types manufacture strawmen to argue at.

[u/Sloth_Brotherhood]

I was debating on posting this here as I wasn’t sure it fit. But I just got to the halfway point and it turns to definitely fit the sub.

[u/blueandgold11]

The pitbull thing isn't out of nowhere: Pit Bulls and Race, A Response to "The Pit Problem" | José

[u/chaoticgay]

i really relate to a lot of what sarah's saying here- i have a similar experience to her. around 2014/2015 i was semi-active on r/tumblrinaction. i was about 13 at the time and enjoyed feeling intellectually superior, which that sub gave me. at the same time i was active on tumblr and slowly started to get a sense of how bullshit the majority of the posts were. i don't think it was great to begin with, but as the sub moved further right and i moved further left, i became increasingly uncomfortable with the way "sjws" were presented on tia.

the sub definitely had radicalizing tendencies- i remember watching MRAs, Sargon of Akkad, etc off of recommendations from other posters. luckily i was just going through a minor edgelord phase, but it still successfully sucked me in for a few months. and looking back, 99% of the posts were a) written by 14 year olds b) sarcastic or c) fake. the whole sub existed as a way to train young, impressionable edgelords into viewing social justice as inherently ridiculous and worthy of mockery. i'm really glad to see someone talking about it, this is a great video!!

[u/chris24680]

While I like the video, I find it odd that it wasn't mentioned that if you look at the recent post history of /u/MechaMew2 a lot of the more recent stuff seems to be dunking on Trump supporters and Q believers (and a lot of anti-pitbull stuff). It seems to me like they're just a weird person who like to make up weird stories about other weird (fake) people in order to get attention online.