The Conservative Hijacking of the Term ‘Woke’ on US Social Media

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Sarah Holland Levin, presenting on the politicisation of social justice discourse. This focusses on the uses of the term ‘woke’, which has been co-opted by bad-faith partisan actors even though it was originally created by Black community actors to encourage political attention and engagement. Today, it is used in conservative culture wars against social justice activism.

The focus here is on Twitter and YouTube, working with some 18 million tweets and 59,000 YouTube videos between 2012 and 2022 that contain the term ‘woke’ and its derivations. These were addressed through LDA topic modelling, clustering analysis, user analysis, and URL extraction. There was a clear increase in the volume of tweets as well as YouTube videos using this term; this is also driven by specific events from the police murder of George Floyd to the various elections during this time.

Opinion leaders on Twitter who use this term include liberals and conservatives, as well as a variety of more specific Black and non-Black groups. Conservatives consistently increased their use of the term woke, while Black entertainment opinion leaders pivoted more to Black politics themes over time. There was considerable cross-sharing of content between the platforms, in both directions; YouTube was often referred to by conservatives on Twitter to ridicule ‘woke’ ideas, while liberals referred less to YouTube. Meanwhile, liberals on YouTube referred more often to content from Twitter, and this is also true for Black entertainment YouTube channels.

This shows a strong politicisation of ‘woke’ over time, and more strongly on Twitter (where there are perhaps also more partisan users and political elites). These partisan users engage on Twitter, but YouTube drives their narratives. Conservatives also demonstrate a coordinated approach to narrative shaping, for instance by actively sharing YouTube links on Twitter. This may explain some of the hijacking of the ‘woke’ topic by conservatives. Liberals and Black opinion leaders many unintentionally aid this by engaging with such right-wing content, even if only negatively.