Is It Just Me Or... Do We Need To Talk About Online Social Justice Culture?

I’ve been knee-deep in the online social justice world for a long time. Body positivity – as a movement invested in showing the value of all bodies – graduates seamlessly into wider social justice movements like anti-racism, disability rights, queer liberation, socialism. It’s all about fighting for the safety, well-being and worth of individuals who’ve been devalued, baby!

If you’re not familiar with online social justice spaces: they are parts of the internet that – on the surface – spread awareness, education and drive positive action around social injustice. And in a lot of places, they still do what it says on the tin.

But if you spend enough time in the deepest depths of online social justice spaces, you start to notice that there are some kinda questionable things going on, that are completely normalised and accepted as the rules of the space…

I existed in these spaces for a long while before I started to notice anything questionable. I was so enthusiastic about connecting with people who actually shared my values and wanted to do good. These were my people! Before I knew it, I was spending hours every day scrolling deeper and deeper. Learning the terminology, unpacking my internalised -isms, pledging to be better and better until I could finally be Good™.

All of which are important things to do if you’re a human who cares about stuff. The world would benefit hugely if more people did them. However, for a lot of us, there comes a point when we’re no longer simply trying our best to be better – we are obsessively striving to be morally perfect according to near-impossible rules under the fear of constant online punishment from our peers. And that ain’t the one.

If you are familiar with these spaces (and have spent long enough in them yourself), you might be sweating right now. Your adrenaline might have spiked even reading the title of this post. You might have an overwhelming feeling of guilt for being here, for even being willing to question what goes on in online social justice culture spaces. After all, we’re not allowed to talk about this. It’s wrong. Bad. Part of the problem.

I know that because I’ve spent years being terrified of talking about any of this. And now I recognise that that feeling alone is a fucking giant red flag that something not so great is going on.

The truth is that while many of these spaces are doing the incredible work of educating, fundraising, and creating real-world change, there are parts where some deeply unhealthy shit is going unchecked – and we’re all too scared to talk about it.

When you get far enough down the social justice rabbit hole, it stops being about education and exploration, and starts being about obedience and repetition. It stops being about inviting people into the cause and starts being about looking for people to throw out. It stops being about wanting the world to be better, and starts being about wanting to make yourself look better, by any means necessary.

I don’t believe that this small part of online social justice culture is populated with evil, bad people. To be totally clear: I was one of these people. Living and breathing the strictest, all-or-nothing social justice values. Always on the look-out for anyone transgressing from the unspoken rules. Posting infographic after infographic as if the entire movement depended on my Instagram stories alone (lol).

I understand how people get there. And hey, maybe some people are genuinely happy there. Maybe existing in that kind of online environment is having no negative impact on their mental health whatsoever. Maybe they really do believe that hunting for a fellow feminist’s 12-year-old tweets and using them to direct a mob of angry social media users their way will eventually set us all free. But it’s not for me, chief.

I’ve spent nearly a year now pulling myself out of the most cult-like parts of those spaces. Working through the impact they had on me in therapy. Interrogating all of my values and redefining them for myself. Unpacking my identity and how I’m allowed to see it. Changing my perspective on what genuine social justice looks like, and how we get there.

I’m not some all-knowing deity ready to declare where we go from here. I’m very much still learning (which, spoiler alert, is actually okay). But what I do know is that there are some things that have been normalised in deepest online social justice culture that are messing a lot of us up mentally. And I’m not scared to talk about it anymore.

Let’s start with:

The absolutely impossible standard of moral perfection.

I will always remember the first time I met one of my social justice heroes. A person who taught me endless amounts about how to advocate for marginalised people and be the ultimate ally (and who I secretly believed must hate me because I wasn’t woke enough). I was terrified to meet this person just in case I did something accidentally problematic and they decided to destroy me on the internet. You know, just a nice, casual meet-up with an online friend!

To my surprise, they were lovely. Gentle, warm, encouraging, all the good things. And partway through the day when they mentioned how much they loved Starbucks, I think my jaw must have visibly dropped. Starbucks? Social justice enemy no. 2 (after Jeff Bezos)??

As time went on, I started to meet more social justice advocates in person who turned out to be not vegan, not donating all their spare time to charities, not living plastic-free, not always steering away from ableist language, not passing every professional opportunity to someone more marginalised than them. In short, they were not morally perfect according to the social justice standard. And that blew my fucking mind.

There I was, genuinely believing that we were all going balls to the wall and following the same all-or-nothing rules that I’d been trying my best to live by (and feeling like shit whenever I failed). I’d been taught that there is no middle ground. You’re either good or bad. Part of the solution or part of the problem. With us or against us.

This kind of black and white thinking, obviously, doesn’t mesh very well with most actual human beings when the enter the offline world. We are all swimming around in the grey area, some of us trying harder than others to do good, a lot of us just trying to get by. Online social justice culture does not acknowledge this.

Online social justice culture says there is only completely good or completely bad. If you show up for one cause, you better show up for every single cause or clearly you don’t actually care. And if you do show up, it better be in exactly the agreed-upon way according to the latest rules, otherwise it’s trash. You’re trash.

There is very little space for mistakes or any kind of public learning. When someone new (inevitably) gets something wrong, it’s highly likely that they will be banished forever. Because we don’t believe in second chances, either.

This impossible standard of moral perfection – getting it right every time, living a perfectly ethical life, knowing things before we have a chance to learn them – it a set up for terrible mental health. It refuses to acknowledge that every one of us is flawed, hurting, projecting, not born with all the answers and also still living in a world that is set up to be unjust. How are you supposed to feel okay about yourself on a day-to-day basis if that’s the standard you’re holding yourself to? Even Lizzo still has to exist within a white supremacist capitalist system where sometimes there is no truly Good™ way to live your life.

The constant threat of public shame.

Oop. Here we go. Hold me back. Time to talk about cancel culture.

A couple of years ago I bought into the line that cancel culture was a concept that didn’t really exist, leveraged by right-wing wankers to avoid accountability and get away with whatever they wanted. And sometimes, it is!

But believing that this is all cancel culture is, conveniently ignores the fact that every single day I was fucking terrified of opening my phone and finding someone I didn’t even know had posted some made up shit about me and wrecked my entire reputation. Kind of weird to be afraid of something that you genuinely believe doesn’t exist…

The sad fact is that social justice, left-leaning online spaces are where some of the most brutal cancellations and call-outs take place. And for the most minor transgressions.

We’ve all seen someone’s account getting dragged across the internet because they supposedly stole something from someone else’s account (who it then turns out, had stolen it from someone else’s account). Or someone losing their entire livelihood for once saying something that in some way might just about be interpreted as somehow problematic. Or Individuals being blamed for institutional problems and whispers about who’s been cancelled and who hasn’t.

For clarity (because we are on the internet): I am not talking about instances of true harm, violence, or repeatedly dangerous behaviour where people in positions of power refuse to stop endangering others and online call-outs become the only way to make them do so. I’m also not talking about calling out corporations, brands, institutions etc. I’m talking about individuals who are actually trying their best and sometimes make mistakes. Or even just supposedly make a mistake, because not every call-out is based in facts, kids.

Needless to say, existing in an online environment where there’s a constantly hovering possibility of widescale public humiliation as a form of punishment for something you might not even have done… Is not great for the ol’ brain. Especially if you’re someone whose mental health issues involve a whole lot of self-punishment already.

The feeling (and reality) of community surveillance.

So, how do we decide whose turn it is next in the social media stocks for us to throw tomatoes at? Ah, of course! We all become part of one big online vigilante crew, constantly policing each other’s content, and keeping each other in line with reminders that someone is always watching.

Now, that might seem a little bit extreme to anyone who hasn’t been in it. However, as someone who has received hundreds (if not thousands) of messages over the years that start with “why haven’t you posted about…”, “I noticed you haven’t talked about…”, “I’m so disappointed you’re still following…” or “can you tell me what you’ve learned lately about…” I can assure you: it happens.

Sometimes it feels like we’re far more concerned with keeping everyone in the movement perfectly in line and stifling any questioning than we are with inviting new people in, teaching, or creating real, functioning movements…

There’s a brilliant episode of the podcast Out Of The Woods where the speaker, Kira, talks about the “imagined audience” in our brains – the people whose reactions we consider when we think about doing or saying things. The people who send these small online requests for us to prove our Goodness™ become our internalised judges; watching over whatever we do and everything we think. They become our internal dialogue. At least, they became mine for a long time.

Hopefully I don’t need to explain why feeling constantly watched by hundreds of people (to whom you will never be good enough) is not a positive thing. And if it’s reinforced consistently enough, it starts to feel as if everyone in your life must also be quietly watching. Waiting for you to slip up. Ready to shame any mistakes and discard you for any moral imperfection. This makes it difficult to trust literally anyone. But hey, what’s a little paranoia in the name of justice?

Feeling legitimately, constantly gaslit.

It is deeply ironic that the emotionally abusive tactic of gaslighting has become one of the things that online social justice culture is always shouting against, given the intense gaslighting that goes on in those very spaces.

Everything that I’ve written about so far, I believe to be true. The impact on my mental health is very real (I have the therapy bill to prove it). I know that these behaviours are common. I have spoken about them with other people who see them too.

However, some of the people who take part in these behaviours, refuse to acknowledge that they even exist. Anyone who dares to suggest the things that I’m suggesting is quickly shut down with an accusation of centring themselves, hiding in their privilege, using mental health as a manipulation tool, and most frustrating of all, gaslighting anyone who they dare to question the tactics of.

The definition of gaslighting is to intentionally make another person doubt their perceived reality as a form of emotional manipulation. Online social justice culture spaces that claim these normalised behaviours don’t cause harm, or worse, don’t even exist, are the embodiment of gaslighting. As Africa Brooke puts it, there is a collective gaslighting happening in these spaces. And it fucks people up.

Reducing actual human beings to online content.

At its most frenzied point, the targets of an online social justice call-out stop being seen as people altogether. In order to justify the mass harassment, calls for punishment, lack of empathy and pitchfork mentality, the target is simply an account. Not a person.

We feel completely okay making sweeping statements about their entire moral character based on tiny square snapshots of their online persona. We disregard whatever else might be going on in their actual life and demand to know why they haven’t shown up online in exactly the ways we want them to. What’s posted becomes everything (which also erases offline community-based social justice work, because if you didn’t post about it, did it even really happen?).

I’ve picked up the pieces of an actual person’s self-esteem too many times after the internet has decided that they no longer have value and discarded them. We are supposed to be better than this. In social justice spaces we are supposed to be building worlds based on respect, humanity, dignity, less punishment and more rehabilitation, less disposability and more community. We are supposed to be able to see each other in our full humanity and hold each other.

We are failing.

It was my dad who first taught me about social justice. He’s a teacher who’s spent his entire career helping kids with learning difficulties and disabilities get a proper education. My parents cared a whole lot about teaching us right and wrong, to help others whenever we could, to have empathy.

I don’t plan on abandoning my social justice belief system anytime soon. I would still define myself as an intersectional feminist with socialist values who’s invested in all marginalised people being free from systems of domination. I believe in social justice, and I’ve learnt a lot from the majority of online social justice spaces.

But for the sake of my own mental health, and the mental health of every single person who I’ve seen impacted by the practices of this small subsection of online social justice culture, I can’t play by the unspoken rules any longer.

I will not accept impossible standards of moral perfection that nobody could ever embody. I refuse to cower under the threat of public shame or be part of any online mob who pick up their pitchforks at the slightest sign of human error. I refuse to be part of some bizarre community surveillance scheme or capitulate to strangers in my inbox demanding I prove my morality to them. I refuse to see humans as accounts. I refuse to lose my own humanity or the humanity of the people around me.

I will not sacrifice my mental health at the altar of online social justice culture. There is far too much work to be done in the actual world, for that.

And if you’re someone who’s also been in those deepest depths and felt anything that I’ve described here, this is my encouragement (and permission) to you, to start questioning. We can do better than this.

If we want to build worlds where every person is respected, treated fairly, granted full humanity and cared for – surely, we have to look in our own house, first.

If you made it to the end of this, thank you. It was a scary one to write and your support has given me the strength to do scary things. If it resonated, feel free to share - if you’re not ready, I see and appreciate you regardless. 💜

For anyone who’s interested in questioning these things further, here are some brilliant resources that have really helped me:

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

Outraged by Ashley Charles

We Will Not Cancel Us by Adrienne Maree Brown

Conflict is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman

I Hope We Choose Love by Kai Cheng Thom

Is Shame Necessary? by Jennifer Jacquet

The Fucking Cancelled Podcast with Clementine and Jay

This episode of the Out Of The Woods Podcast

Basically all of Africa Brooke’s work