"Shock Influencers" Web Artifact

For my project, I endeavored to choose something very relevant to me—social media and its confluence of shock-humor "influencers." These so-called "influencers" consist of straight men who build social media platforms by sharing their conservative and regressive opinions on polarizing topics such as the LGBTQ+ Community, Women's Rights, Racism, Guns, and politics as a whole. The stances are usually disseminated through TikTok as clips from podcasts. However, these ideologies tend to be backed up by misinformation and are shared to an audience made up of impressionable teenage boys who thrive off toxicity and desire "shock content." Shock content is a subgenre "deliberately designed to evoke strong emotional reactions, typically through the use of graphic, disturbing, or provocative elements."

The video I created with my co-star, Izzy Yaffe, is a satirical recreation of the previously mentioned type of videos, specifically inspired by the influencer @Sneako. Sneako's entire platform revolves around sharing conservative perspectives with justifications brimming with xenophobia and untrue information. The podcasts serving as the source material for these Tiktoks feature the host of the podcast and the influencer engaging in conversations on highly polarizing topics. The host is typically in agreement with their guest, rarely offering a critical analysis of the influencer's claims or statements. My video differs because the host finally claps back. Additionally, in this age of the internet, fact-checking appears to be, quite frankly, absent. It is incredibly easy to start a lie and spread it to a large audience without doubt about the claim's validity. The audience of these videos will then agree with whatever Sneako says and incorporate the rhetoric into their beliefs, meaning that a substantial group of individuals is actively becoming less informed and more bigoted members of society. 

For my role, I embodied the stereotypical "douce bag" and repeated rhetoric common to the type I was recreating: misinformed and sloppily presented. I juxtapose my strong and bold claims with Izzy's calm and humorous demeanor.