The Life-Changing Magic of Understanding Subtext on the Internet
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: Shutterstock
Content warning: this newsletter contains references to sexual assault.
I don’t know her, but I guarantee that when Women Talking director Sarah Polley made a Twitter joke about Marie Kondo on Saturday, she thought she was just riffing on a trending topic. Understandable—that is the most Twitter thing to do. But actually, she was wading into a discourse around racism and sexism that was either deeply surprising or 100% expected, depending on how online you are and what side of the internet you inhabit. And okay, the stakes of this particular tweet-and-delete saga are pretty low, but I think it is a useful way to explore how we communicate online in 2023. Which is to say—how we communicate, period.
… Especially when combined with another recent celebrity misstep that stemmed from missed context. On Jan. 22, TikTok user Conor Whipple posted a video about being sexually assaulted using the word ‘mascara’ as code, which had recently become a trend on the app. The onscreen text read, “I gave this one girl mascara one time and it must’ve been so good that she decided her and her friend should both try it without my consent.” Later that week, Fox left what may be the worst comment she could have left: “Idk why but I don’t feel bad for u lol.” Since then, she has deleted the comment and apologized, explaining that she was “just not on that side of TikTok and [she] really thought this man was crying about mascara.”
It’s tempting to understand these situations simply as celebrities being out of the loop, and sure, I guess that’s part of it. But they also show us how communication on the internet works right now—and highlight the role the platforms themselves play in shaping that communication.
If you didn’t know, the Marie Kondo backlash is definitely racist
First, a little backstory on this round of Kondo discourse: In a Washington Post profile published last week, Kondo updated us on her attitude toward tidying now that she has three kids, saying, “I have kind of given up on that in a good way for me. Now I realize what is important to me is enjoying spending time with my children at home.” Predictably, a certain faction of the internet (yes, they absolutely were) felt intense schadenfreude over this revelation, posting joking-not-joking commentary about how they were vindicated, she was a fraud and/or they always knew she wasn’t worth listening to.
This was not surprising. In fact, it was almost identical to previous backlashes against the organizing influencer. In January 2019, a white lady went viral for tweeting that Kondo advised throwing out all your books in her Netflix show, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. This was not true, for the record, but it sparked (🤷🏽♀️️) many angry think pieces and Twitter threads about Kondo, her organizing method and why her minimalist approach was impractical, over the top and/or anti-parent—even though she’s not a minimalist and wasn’t trying to make anyone do anything. Then, in November 2019, the launch of her online store inspired even more commentary, this time heavy on the grifter accusations, a criticism that somehow never gets applied to white lifestyle influencers like Martha Stewart or Kourtney Kardashian. And who can forget our good pal Alison Roman, who went viral for a May 2020 interview where she made racist comments about Asian women selling things (Kondo, Chrissy Teigen) just before plugging her own products. At least in that case there were consequences, sort of. Roman ended up leaving her plum New York Times gig in the aftermath of that scandal, though I’m pretty sure she had already planned to start her own content creation company and this just sped up the timeline. She also seems to have learned absolutely nothing from the whole experience.
All of which is to say, white people—and especially white woman—have been weird about Kondo for a very long time. And yes, it very much has to do with her race and gender. As Muqing Zhang wrote in 2019 in response to the book thing, “ultimately, white people's initially voracious viral consumption of and then sudden vilification of Kondo exemplifies the duality of the tropes projected onto Asian women—we are either a fetishized exotic experience or embodiment of a yellow peril threat. Once Kondo was no longer an exoticism's site of pleasure and exploitation for white people to experience their orientalist fantasies, she became the other orientalist trope—the yellow peril threat to white people's insecurity over their destructive capitalist consumption.”
This is why I find it a bit hard to believe that Polley (and the other people who made these joking-not-joking comments) missed the fact that past news cycles about Kondo were deeply racist and sexist, just because this is literally round four. But it’s certainly possible!
The mascara thing is a consequence of ‘algospeak’
I have a much easier time understanding how Fox could have missed the coded meaning of mascara, though. The primary explanation, as she said, is that she wasn’t “on that side of TikTok,” which has become a kind of shorthand for the ever-increasing individualization of our online experiences. If the utopian expectation of the internet was that it would democratize knowledge, encouraging everyone to access information autonomously, our actual internet experience largely depends on algorithms designed to show us the content we are each most likely to engage with. This is a nakedly capitalist bid to monopolize our attention for as long as possible, and nowhere is it more obvious than on your TikTok For You Page, which can be so drastically different from your loved ones’ FYPs that it can feel like you’re on totally different apps. A few examples: last year, one of my friends told me she had been happily hanging out on Lobstertok for months; I had literally never heard of it. Meanwhile, my brother recently informed me that Daloontok exists. (These dabloons are a fictional, TikTok-specific pseudocurrency, not the actual gold coins pirates used, FYI.) But those mascara videos? They’ve been all over my FYP.
The other reason Fox likely missed the context (aside from having autism, which she revealed in November) is how conversations develop online, and specifically on TikTok. There are two factors at play here: first, how quickly jokes and trends can iterate as more and more users engage with them and second, how the fear of being flagged or shadowbanned forces creators to use ‘algospeak.’ On the first point, ‘mascara’ did not initially mean sexual assault. Initially, young women were using it to post about relationships, and especially their early experiences with sex, often over the song “Constellations” by Duster. Before long, though, the trend evolved to include conversations about sexual violence and trauma, which is how Whipple was using it.
But that of course leads us to the second point, which is why the hell people needed a code word in the first place. And the answer to that is TikTok’s AI-driven approach to content moderation. As Fast Company explained last year, TikTokers use “algospeak (a combo of ‘algorithm’ and ‘speak’)… to talk about hot button issues or potentially controversial topics without the content getting flagged or removed. It’s something marginalized creators have glommed onto, as their content is disproportionately targeted by automated content-moderation filters.” So: ‘mascara’ instead of sex/sexual assault, ‘seggs’ instead of sex, ‘grape’ instead of rape, ‘accountant’ instead of sex worker, ‘corn’ or 🌽 instead of porn, ‘unalive’ instead of kill/suicide, ‘camping’ instead of abortion. This isn’t a new tactic by any means, but it has become much more widespread thanks to TikTok’s sheer ubiquity.
Platforms are encouraging this type of misunderstanding
My initial reaction to both Polley and Fox’s comments was “yikes,” not because I thought they were racist or rape apologists, but because it was clear that neither really understood the context behind the thing they were commenting on. But the more I think about it, the more I realize both stories are actually about social media platforms’ culture, policies and capitalist interests.
In Polley’s case, it’s important to understand that Twitter is designed around the snarky quote-tweet. Advertising has traditionally been the platform’s primary source of revenue—in 2021, it reported $5.08 billion USD in total revenue, of which $4.51 billion USD came from advertising—which means its product isn’t tech; it’s users. That’s why it incentivizes the type of communication that will yield a large, engaged user base so it can attract companies that want to spend their advertising dollars on the site. According to a 2020 study out of the University of Utah, “Twitter makes conversation into something like a game. It scores our communication, giving us vivid and quantified feedback via Likes, Retweets, and Follower counts [which] increase[s] our motivation to communicate.” But, it also changes the way we communicate. “Games are more satisfying than ordinary life precisely because game-goals are simpler, cleaner, and easier to apply. Twitter is thrilling precisely because its goals have been artificially clarified and narrowed. When we buy into Twitter’s gamification, then our values shift from the complex and pluralistic values of communication, to the narrower quest for popularity and virality.” In short: Twitter encourages us to publish our hot takes as quickly as possible so we can get in on the conversation to better our chances of ‘winning’—which means we sometimes don’t think about what we’re actually saying or double-checking to make sure we understand the nuances of the conversation we’re trying to join. And even though Twitter’s reliance on advertising is changing in the Age of Elon (he wants to quintuple revenue to $26.4 billion by 2028 and reduce the company’s reliance on advertising by 50%, and also advertisers are leaving the platform in droves), this dynamic remains deeply integrated into Twitter’s product design.
Meanwhile with Fox, it’s really about the impact of content moderation. This is extremely valuable in online social spaces, especially those with large youth user bases. (Obviously.) But when humans are responsible for content moderation, the personal cost is very high; a 2019 Verge feature reported (in graphic detail, so massive content warning for that link) what kinds of things moderators, who are often contractors, would be evaluating to judge whether it should be removed from a platform. Namely, violence, hate speech and graphic pornography. The result, according to The Verge: “moderators cope with seeing traumatic images and videos by telling dark jokes about committing suicide, then smoking weed during breaks to numb their emotions. Employees are developing PTSD-like symptoms after they leave the company, but are no longer eligible for any support from Facebook or Cognizant,” which is the company it contracts to handle its moderation.
In that context, relying on AI for content moderation looks like a no-brainer. But, I wonder about the psychological and sociological consequences of using algospeak to talk about our bodies, intimacy and sexual assault. One of the key recommendations around talking to kids about sex is using the correct terminology for body parts so they can clearly communicate any health issues or injuries, so it feels bizarre to see the teenagers and twentysomethings who are driving this particular trend work so hard to conceal meaning. I don’t have an answer here, for the record. I just don’t like the idea that TikTok is encouraging us to turn difficult conversations about topics we should be de-stigmatizing into in-jokes that not everyone gets. These things actual happen to the app’s users, and it’s important to have communities where they can talk openly and honestly about those experiences. Discouraging that kind of conversation, even if it’s unintentional, doesn’t make anyone any safer.
I also don’t have a real conclusion, other than: I saw lots of people try to downplay Polley’s joke or roll their eyes at how extremely online it was to get mad at Julia Fox for not understanding the hidden meaning of ‘mascara.’ But I think when we actually pay attention to the factors that led to these individual celebrity stories, we learn a lot about online communication—and that matters, because the internet is no longer some kind of separate social space from the ‘real world.’ Eventually, everything that happens there filters offline, too.
And Did You Hear About…
The Cut’s excellent (though controversial) analysis of fashion house Pyer Moss’ unfulfilled promise.
This roundup of 28 Black films for 28 days of Black History Month by Maya S. Cade, a curator and scholar-in-residence at the U.S. Library of Congress. (She also curated lists in 2022 and 2021.)
The Canadian megachurch facing multiple sexual misconduct scandals.
Jennifer Lopez’s wedding romcom industrial complex.
This Twitter thread of funny red carpet moments.
My piece on Pamela Anderson, misogyny and reclaiming narratives for The Kit.
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