The Socially-Conscious Mean Girl

my trip down the Reddit hole of snark pages

I recently fell down the rabbit hole of influencer snark pages. I say “fell down the rabbit hole” as if it’s my first experience, as though it’s something I passively stumbled upon, but really it’s more like I put my hand back on the electric fence and realized, for the hundredth time, why people don’t touch those.

Writing about the internet in 2010, Sady Doyle described snark as “an attitude…Snark is the kids at the back of the class, heckling the substitute teacher; it's the voice of people who feel stifled, talked down to, or left out; the tool of people who have discovered that honing in on the weaknesses of those in power, exposing them publicly (if only to their own circle of friends), and reducing them to figures of fun (if only in their own minds), makes them feel a little less helpless.”

Citing a 10+ year old article about the internet may seem akin to using a 1500’s surgical manual (we don’t have soap yet, have you tried leeches?!), but I do think Doyle’s point still stands, to an extent, about “the point” of snark.

There is something inherently enraging about a thin, white, cisgendered influencer who makes her money off occasional brand deals, embodying the hegemonic standard of beauty and trying to sell it to everyone else. It’s natural, and probably healthy, for people to release the pressure valve. Plus, no one is immune to the charms of shit-talking — finally meeting the person that everyone else is obsessed with and lamenting with your friend about how they’re actually kind of boring is a sacred moment I wouldn’t want to take from anyone. But I’m not sure that’s exactly what is happening here, in the back alleys of Reddit.

For the blissfully uninitiated, allow me to set up a brief map of Reddit snark pages.

The snark page is dedicated to a woman, or multiple women. It’s always about women, even when it’s about men. Go ahead and look at the top posts on r/TimotheeChalametSnark — they’re all about Kylie. Sometimes the pages are dedicated to individual women, or helpfully categorized to catch multiple women of the same ilk in one community (if you want to search, simply, “influencer snark,” you will find that there are bi-coastal pages to delineate LA and NYC influencers). There are pages dedicated to women with any amount of followers, not just the big-fish pariahs that know better than to search their name online. In my research, I even found snark pages about women with almost no digital footprint, clearly created by someone in her personal life, that have somehow amassed a small following.

The members of these subreddits consider themselves in community with one another. Frequently, in catch-all snark subreddits, someone will make a post trying to promote a new, more niche snark page. “Noticing that a lot of people are talking about X in this page, so I started one dedicated to her. Trying to build up the community on the new page, so come interact!” They make rules against bullying, harassing, and trolling each other. They meticulously organize the “types” of snark under various tags to make it easier for someone to find something she was looking for. They care about each other. They care, in general. That’s why they’re doing all of this in the first place.

Snark is the tool of the digital proletariat. The common thread between all snark pages — from those about Christian evangelical influencers promoting borderline genocidal transphobic ideology to influencers with a few thousand followers hocking biodegradable self-tanner — is the belief that the snarkers are punching up.

Everything collapses when this is true. Snark pages are made about nazis and body-checkers and food bloggers and right-wing pundits and women who are accused of being all of the above. These spaces level everything off to the same value of harm, posting accusations of racism next to an unflattering mirror selfie. Despite most snark Reddits having a “no body-shaming” rule, the majority of posts in such threads are critiques on the woman’s body, which is fine to do when the woman in question is a bad person.

In a TikTok from last year, influencer Acacia Kersey opened up about her previous marriage and its abusive nature. In the video, she cries while talking about how she became afraid of her husband, concerned for her children, and without community on which to rely. A screenshot from that video is now the profile photo of r/AcaciaKerseySnark.

The most serious accusation against Acacia is one of child neglect — a case for which there are some compelling points. But in the Reddit, the accusation functions as a shield, stated first to allow other, less serious accusations to pass through. Like the accusation of looking ugly.

One look at the page makes it abundantly clear that the posters are far more concerned with finally having a “good reason” to say what they’ve always felt than with actually stopping any injustice that may be occuring. This is another commonality between snark pages — there is usually a “big bad” that is cited alongside more superficial critique, the former justifying the latter.

People in the Acacia Kersey subreddit don’t care that her kids are potentially being neglected. In fact, they need this to be true so they can continue making posts about the way her double chin looks on video, the way she FaceTuned a photo, the dumb books she’s reading. They need her to be simultaneously pathetic and all-powerful. They need her to be bad so that they can be righteous.

The snarkers aren’t calling the women fat. They’re calling out harm done by compiling meticulous screenshots of a woman’s body in different angles to prove that she is body checking. They’re posting side-by-sides of a tagged photo at the beach where you can see her stomach fat versus a sponsored post of the same woman looking toned, to help the young girls who may be harmed by her inauthenticity. Nothing is said about the harm of a surveillance culture that exclusively surveils women and has become even harder to identify once masked as social justice activism.

And, listen, I know the demographics of these things. For the most part, it’s white girl on white girl crime. I’m resisting the urge to slide into this kind of territory:

Because I believe that these people actually care about children not being abused and people not being racist to other people and all of the other stuff. But I also think that caring about these things has become a convenient cover for regular, natural cruelty. We have to pretend that we are not jealous or resentful or even hateful for no good reason. We have to pretend that we are not human beings, stuck in the late-stage capitalist push to objectify and sell ourselves and be more perfect, more skinny, more rich, and it’s making us all crazy.

Who would we go after if not the influencer? The Koch Brothers? Jeff Bezos? Well, we can’t do that. They’re too big, too powerful, too responsible. If we pick a fight we could actually win, solve a problem that actually exists, then we wouldn’t be able to fight anymore. And that’s the best part — the fighting — especially when everything feels futile. At least you can hold a sword while the world burns.

I might be flying off the handle at this point, but imagine if these snarkers could utilize their skills effectively. These girls have research chops, and I really mean it. Imagine if they tracked political stock trades, snarked on the most recent anti-aging campaign from a billion dollar cosmetics company and made them change their branding, or organized a labor strike. It doesn’t have the same schadenfreudal rewards as the other stuff, sure, but we need to direct this energy somewhere.

And what if we stopped demonizing jealousy? What if it was okay to see a girl and be like, wow, I hate her for some reason I haven’t decided yet. What if we stopped making caricatures of each other, instead allowing our caveman brains to process their rage in spaces like the text thread with a close friend or a journal or a boxing class?

I care less about people being mean to influencers than I do about the fact that nothing useful is produced when this happens. I don’t think it lets relatively disempowered young women let off steam about an unfair system or takes the big guys down a peg or makes anyone feel any better. I don’t think it makes the world more fair or safe or right for marginalized people, in fact I think it inhibits genuine efforts towards that end.

If you go deep enough, you find the sad things. You find girls who spent hours compiling proof that an influencer photoshops asking a looksmaxing subreddit what she can do to be prettier. You find girls making fun of an influencer’s best-selling book trying to promote her self-published, poorly reviewed poetry collection. You find mean girls, who are really just girls trying to make themselves feel better. They think they’re punching up, but it’s the internet, so they have no fist and the words float aimlessly before turning into vapor and finding a place to disappear.