The ‘call-out culture’ controversy: An identity-based cultural conflict

Abstract
Calling out refers to the use of social media to publicly criticise behaviour perceived to be oppressive
towards marginalised individuals. Call-outs as a social phenomenon are understood to function by
appealing to the morality of the online audience to subvert the power dynamics within discourse. A
widely discussed controversy exists surrounding the cultural legitimacy of employing calling out, with
many describing it as ‘toxic’ to digital environments. This dissertation focuses on the controversy,
aiming to answer the following questions: what positions, discourse narratives, and opinions
(considered as forming ‘stances’) make up the controversy surrounding call-out culture? And what
underlying issues generate the perception of this practice as toxic and misused? 103 online articles
and thinkpieces discussing calling out were qualitatively coded to identify emerging narratives and
themes. Results show that while the most common cultural narrative presents calling out as a
powerful but dangerous tool, marginalised communities revendicate the right to determine when
oppression is occurring and thus when calling out is appropriate. This conflict is then analysed and
understood as an identity-based struggle for cultural legitimacy and control over calling out. The
conflict is instantiated in debate surrounding relevant affordances of platforms and technology; in
particular, the viral sharing of evidence in the form of images and videos and the ability to record
others through cameras. The conflict over calling out is situated within the framework of the
attention economy: as all call-outs must receive attention to have impact, it is argued that the
presence of an audience becomes a motivator for the misuse of calling out, no longer employed as a
tool of protest, but a way to build one’s online persona as a socially conscious activist. This generates
the perception of misuse, creating further conflict, as call-outs are split into ‘authentic’ and
‘performative’.
Table of contents

1. Introduction 2

2. Background: Contextualising call-out culture 5

3. Methodology 9

4. Analysis 15

4.1. Understanding the call-out controversy 15

4.2. Understanding call-out culture: Underlying issues 20

4.2.1. Evidence, truth and misinformation 20

4.2.2. Performance, competition and attention 28

4.3. Case study: #LICENZIA_LUCA_MORISI_ 34

5. Conclusion 37

6. References 38

6.1. Articles referenced in the analysis 38

6.2. Academic references 41

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1. Introduction

This dissertation aims to give an overview of the cultural narratives within call-out culture, a much-
debated and under-researched social phenomenon of contemporary digital spaces. ‘Calling out’
refers to the practice of using social media as a platform to criticise any action seen as morally
reprehensive. This ranges from racist, sexist, transphobic or otherwise oppressive behaviour to the
breaking of generally accepted social norms, but it is a practice seen as typical of digital activists and
anyone else campaigning for a more equal society (Ahmad, 2015; Roopika, 2015; Nakamura, 2015).
By shining a light on oppressive behaviour, these actors rely on the morality and power of the online
audience, a ‘smart mob’ (Rheingold, 2003), to subvert the power dynamic, and affect discourse seen
as racist, sexist, or otherwise aimed at silencing a vulnerable group.

Call outs can have anyone as a recipient: institutions such as governments or law enforcement;
visible individuals, such as entertainers and politicians; or even private citizens, previously unknown,
who suddenly become the focus of attention online. Depending on the nature of the call-out and the
actors involved, consequences and characteristics of a call-out vary. Some large scale call-outs can
lead to the formation of hashtag campaigns aimed at institutions, such as the #Ferguson movement
challenging police brutality; such cases are recognised as powerful spaces for protest and social
change (Rosa and Bonilla, 2015). When the object of the call out is a private citizen who has broken
social norms, call-outs can lead to loss of employment for the recipient, and to ‘digital exposure’ of
the individual’s life, including personal information resulting in threats and other danger (Dennis,
2008, p.351). Similarly, those who perform the call out can receive notoriety and valuable attention,
or inversely make themselves the target of abuse (Jane, 2016). Ultimately, call-outs occur on a range
of social media platforms, most notably Twitter but including any site in which text, images and
other content can be shared with an audience; however, they often have consequences well beyond
the digital space, tangibly affecting lives and society.

The term call-out culture is used to refer to the ‘social phenomenon’ of calling out (Vigo, 2019). The
term ‘culture’ is intended to encompass all characteristics of this practice, including its language, the

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tone of those who participate in it, and its general rules. In fact, as Roopika (2015) points out, “call-
out culture has a lexicon of its own” (p.2); she cites examples of terminology of recent creation
emerging from the feminist community, such as ‘mansplaining’, which is used to criticise the
patronising tone of men who explain known concepts to women (Solnit, 2012).

While no official source exists on the origin of the term call-out, and the related call-out culture,
some argue that the practice became common in 2011-2012 on the social media platform Tumblr,
where Black women began publicly showing and criticising the constant threats they received
through the platform (Riley, 2018), with the aim of stopping the harassment. Davie (2015) identifies
the 2011 article “Come one, come all! Feminist and Social Justice blogging as performance and
bloodshed” as the one that popularised the term call-out culture, already framing it in a negative
way as an excessively punitive practice.

Valuable tool or public shaming? Introducing the call-out controversy

In 2015, Nakamura wrote an academic article describing and conceptualising the practice of calling
out as a form of online affective labour enacted by women of colour and queer individuals.
Nakamura was inspired by an online manifesto, entitled #ThisTweetCalledMyBack (2015), published
in Model View Culture and authored by six black women and social media justice activists. The
manifesto underlined the underappreciation of the call-out practice, seen as a form of labour
consisting of interventions in online discourse with the goal of educating users on matters of sexism,
racism, homophobia and transphobia. Nakamura collocates calling out within the Marxist and
Feminist theory of labour, referring to Terranova’s (2000) concept of freely given digital labour. In
the following year, another academic researching social media also offered a description of call-out
and call-out culture. Stewart (2016), while discussing academics’ vulnerability and strategies to deal
with Twitter’s context collapse, mentions the “rise” of call-out culture, and defines it as a
“phenomenon, in which tweets are amplified and circulated through large-scale networks to shame
(...) identities whose speech is deemed unacceptable” (p.78); she goes on to characterise this
phenomenon as a “widely reported feature of Twitter culture”.

These two definitions constitute examples of the few existing discussions of call-out in academic
writing. Each embodies a different perspective on the issue, and the contrast between them is
glaring: Nakamura (2015) has a positive outlook on calling out as an undervalued educational
practice, whereby a member of a systematically oppressed group makes the effort to intervene in a
digital conversation and educate others on matters of sexism, racism, and other forms of

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oppression; Stewart (2016), on the other hand, describes call-out negatively, as a phenomenon
consisting in the shaming of individuals based on what they have shared on Twitter. The contrast
outlined here, between call-out as an educational tool employed by minorities and call-out as a
‘toxic’ practice based in shaming, encapsulates the two extreme perspectives on the call-out culture
problem, together forming a controversy surrounding the practice. A deeper look into this
controversy reveals an extremely complex issue, which, as will be explored in the following chapters,
sits at the intersection of race, gender, and the infrastructures of the attention economy through
which social media platforms operate.

Research questions
The following research questions guided the research: what positions, discourse narratives, and
opinions (all considered as forming ‘stances’) make up the controversy surrounding call-out culture?
And what underlying issues generate the perception of this practice as toxic and misused? In order
to answer the research questions, 103 online articles and thinkpieces debating call-out culture,
taking a stance towards it as either a useful or toxic practice, were collected and analysed
qualitatively. All textual content was coded through a Grounded Theory approach (Corbin & Strauss,
1990), resulting in two groups of related themes: firstly, evidence, truth and misinformation;
secondly, performance, competition and attention. Moreover, the narratives making up the negative
stance towards call-out culture, as well as the emerging counter-narrative, were coded and
analysed.

Call-out culture is understood in this work as an example of digital activism (Boulton, 2017; Jane,
2016), and as part of an ongoing shift from traditional understandings of political participation to a
more personal, private form (Bakardjeva, 2010), and aiming to enact symbolic change in cultural
discourse and achieve recognition for devalued and marginalised identities (Fraser, 1996). In fact,
analysis of the stances showed that the controversy surrounding calling out is the location of a
conflict between groups based in ethnic, sexual and gender identity, over the cultural legitimacy of
the call out practice, and the employment of its power. Call outs rely on the power of the network of
social media users, a “smart mob” (Rheingold, 2003), which, when directing its attention to an issue,
is capable of applying huge pressure through the production of online content and offline action.
The investigation of the themes underlying the perception of call-out culture as toxic and misused
show that this struggle occurs in every encounter between call-out culture and the affordances of
social media and other technology: practices such as the collection of evidence from digital traces,
the power to inform or misinform through viral content, and the ability to record daily life through

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camera phones are narrated in opposite ways throughout the data, showing the existence of an
identity-based conflict surrounding how, when and by whom these practices should legitimately be
used. The conflict is then situated within the attention economy governing social media (Terranova
2012, Venturini, 2012). The practice interacts with the attention economy in a way that leads to its
perception as ‘misused’: the purpose of calling out becomes indistinguishable from its success in
achieving visibility and building users’ image as microcelebrity activists, or simply socially conscious
members of the online community (Tufekci, 2013). Thus, the idea of call-out-as-performance arises,
leading to further conflict between ‘authentic’ and ‘performative’ call-out practices.

2. Background: Contextualising call-out culture

Call-outs before and beyond the internet

While ‘call-out culture’ as a specific term emerged on the internet, none of the elements which
constitute the practice are a recent development. Producing culture (such as poems, posters and
memes) with the goal of spreading progressive ideals, for instance, was an important feature of 21st
century activist movements (Reed, 2019); public shaming and exile as a tool to enforce social norms
has a complex and rich history dating back millennia, finding a notable predecessor in the ostracism
practice of classical Athens (Mattingly, 1991). In more recent times, there are examples of situations
comparable to the modern call-outs arising in the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s and
1970s: American feminist Jo Freeman published an article in 1976 describing the practice of
“trashing” within the movement, defined as a denunciation, leading to “character assassination”,
done to “disparage and destroy” members of the group who are perceived as no longer helpful to
the cause. Social phenomena that are considered typical of digital culture, while often amplified,
supplemented and changed by the affordances of new technologies, have roots beyond a strict
online-offline dichotomy: social practices intertwine the digital and offline world, and the two
cannot be separated without simplifying our understanding of such practices (Wellman, 2001, p.18).

Affordances of Twitter and other social media

Call-outs take place within and through social media. Most often, calling out is associated with the
online microblogging platform Twitter. Roopika (2015, p.2) mentions the platform in her discussion
of feminist call-out culture, while Stewart (2016) cites calling out in her analysis of academics’
practices on Twitter. In online articles, Twitter is described as “the biggest site where you will find
call-out culture” (Tedrow, 2018). The platform was founded in 2008; as of late April 2019, it reported
134 million daily active users (Twitter, 2019). Accounts on the platform can be followed by anyone,

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thus creating asymmetric ties: popular or high-profile accounts can have enormous following,
meaning their content will be visible to many, while the average user’s account is likely to have a
small following, while the content they share is public. The platform allows its users to write short
posts (the current limit being 280 characters), which can contain mentions of other users through
the “@user” syntax (boyd, Golder and Lotan, 2010), or be in reply to another’s or their own post.
Moreover, the hashtag symbol (#) is most prominently used to make tweets ‘searchable’ within a
larger conversation centering around a particular topic (Zappavigna, 2012). Lastly, users can retweet
other’s posts to their audience of followers (boyd, Golder and Lotan, 2010).

These functions allow Twitter users to have asynchronous conversations beyond geographic
constraints. Such conversations are not bound within a specific digital area, or ‘thread’, as occurs on
forums; rather, through retweets and hashtags, conversations take place through a network of
interconnected actors. The structure of Twitter gives rise to a “conversational ecology” in which all
users, including those that are not participating or central to the discussion, can feel part of a shared
conversational context (boyd, Golder and Lotan, 2010), and become attuned to its voices, emotions
and prevailing opinions. Other social media can have similar affordances: on Facebook, Instagram
and Tumblr users can follow popular pages or accounts, sharing their content, thus recreating the
asymmetric network tie as it occurs on Twitter and participating in a wider conversation. However,
the presence of hashtags, the possibility to address and respond to others, and the public nature of
Twitter make it a space in which grassroot movements, political activism and social campaigns can
flourish (Gleason, 2013). It is within this type of communication that the practice of calling out
emerges.

Calling out as digital activism

Many define calling out as a type of activism, or a practice typical of activists. For instance, Ahmad’s
widely cited piece, A Note on Call-Out Culture (2015), describes it as a “tendency among
progressives, radicals, activists, and community organizers”. Therefore, calling out, as a form of
online criticism aimed at all that is deemed sexist, racist, transphobic or otherwise problematic,
should be collocated within the context of digital activism, a topic on which scholarly attention has
been increasing. Many have focused on social media, and particularly Twitter, as platforms through
which activism, social change and unrest are informed and mobilised (Gleason, 2013; Bosch, 2017).
However, the impact of social media platforms on rates of political participation is debated. Bimber,
Stohl et al. (2010) argue that contributions to social media discourse does not necessarily lead to
higher levels of participation, especially for those that are not already invested. The derisive term

6
“slacktivism” (Morozov, 2009) has been coined to indicate online activism which requires less effort
than traditional activism, and is thought of as “lazy and phony” (Sherer, 2015) and having no
considerable consequence. Some worry slacktivism is replacing meaningful ‘real-life’ action with a
false sense of improvement (Morozov, 2009). Boulton (2017) argues instead that online activism
campaigns have the potential to have a positive impact, even if it is just raising awareness of human
rights issues amongst the young. Along the same lines, Galais and Anduiza (2016) show that online
participation can create a ‘spillover effect’, boosting participation in offline political activity.

Social media activism has been used to “fill the gap in the national media coverage”, particularly
with regards to the issues of women of colour (Berridge and Portwood-Stacer, 2015). A number of
hashtags bringing attention to important discussions of race and gender have emerged on Twitter in
the last decade, with #BlackLivesMatter (Yang, 2016) and #MeToo (Jaffe, 2018) constituting perhaps
the most notable recent examples. The practice of calling out, intended as criticising and highlighting
oppressive actions, has an important role within this form of hashtag activism. Some go as far as
indicating #MeToo as a particularly positive and successful iteration of call out culture (Rutherford,
2018): Schwartz (2018) describes it as “the biggest phenomenon of calling out we’ve ever seen”.

Activism in daily life: Subactivism

The ability to communicate, inform and organise online has been creating shifts in the way activism
is performed by private citizens. In particular, activism and politics play a growing role in daily life,
resulting in a blurring of the public and private, ethical and political. In an effort to theorise such
developments, Bakardjeva (2010) introduces the idea of subactivism in her discussion of politics in
the digital age. Subactivism describes a type of political activism that is “not about political power
[...] but about personal empowerment” (p.134). Unlike traditional political activism, it occurs within
one’s subjective experience and daily life; it is described as “constituted by small-scale decisions and
actions that have either a political or ethical frame of reference [...], a refraction of the public
political arena in the private and personal world” (p.92). By bringing the political into the private
sphere, the boundary between ethics and politics is confounded. Such a description resonates with
many examples of call-outs: while some are collocated in the public, political sphere, such as those
that lead to the formation of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, many take the shape of individuals
criticising actions they observe in their daily life, and to which they assign political meaning.

Digital vigilantism: A shift from the public to the private

In a further step in the politicisation process of private life, social media users have also been

7
observed to take on the role of activists seeking informal justice when they find themselves victims
of hate or attacked. Many such instances take the form of online call-outs which aim to ‘name and
shame’ perpetrators. Jane (2016) describes the female gamers who, in 2014, received threats of
sexual violence and responded by alerting their mothers as feminist “digilantes”, a portmanteau
combining ‘digital’ and ‘vigilantes’. Such a response to online hate, while celebrated by the media as
a clever and effective solution, is identified by the researcher as one that shifts the responsibility to
the victim, and “from the public to the private sphere” (p. 285). Fileborn (2016) focuses on how
social media and online activism is used by victims of street harassment to seek informal justice. As
harassment is rarely responded to through formal criminal justice settings, victims seek that
response online. This practice raises numerous issues. Firstly, in relation to due process and
vigilantism, as it is impossible, once information on the perpetrators is shared, to control the amount
of attention and general shape that the online response will take. Secondly, online spaces might
become spaces where victims, once exposed, risk further harm. Even victims of rape have been
turning to social media to find a sense of justice that formal channels do not provide (Powell, 2015).

The practice of calling out, in many of its iterations, collocates itself within this shift from public and
formal channels of justice seeking to more informal methods to achieve a sense of fairness. In a
further move away from traditional activism, it is not just victims of sexual harassment (or other
forms of structural oppression) who have turned to social media and call-outs: rather, online
shaming campaigns have often been aimed at those who have been found, more generally, to have
broken conformity to social norms. Skoric et al. (2010) examine the phenomenon of “social shaming
websites” (p.182) particularly in the Asian context, where undesirable behaviours in public space,
such as driving and parking mistakes or failing to clean up after one’s dog, are recorded through
technology and shared online, with the goal of generating shame in the perpetrator and thus
enforcing norms.

Researchers underline the role of peer surveillance, supported by tools such as camera phones, in
enabling this form of shaming. Mann (2004) introduced the term sousveillance, meaning surveillance
‘from below’, which does not respect existing power hierarchies, occurring on a person-to-person
basis. Cameras, in particular, are the technology which enables sousveillance, as any action could be
recorded and the individuals involved held accountable (Dennis, 2008): each individual in possession
of a phone can record and share online a perceived social transgression. This practice of
sousveillance becomes a type of labour, as citizens work to gather evidence of other’s actions, in a
form of participatory citizen journalism (Gillmor, 2004). As will be explored in the analysis, it is the

8
combination of these issues of information collection and consumption with the digital attention
economy which completes the picture of the context in which call-out culture is collocated.

3. Methodology

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate call-out practices and the controversy surrounding call-
out culture. Gathering and analysing data that accurately represents digital culture, and in particular
ongoing debates, is complex: As Venturini and Latour (2010) point out, “the problem of social life is
that every situation involving more than two people can quickly become unbelievably complicated”
(p. x); similarly, Law (2004) describes social reality as inherently messy and complex. Postill and Pink
(2012) extend this concept to digital life, defining social media as part of the “messy web” (p.125).

The debated issue of ‘call-out culture’ fits within Latour and Venturini’s definition of a controversy,
i.e. an emerging and discussed social phenomenon, on which there is no consensus. In fact, call-outs
are variably described by journalists, activists and academics as useful and educational (Nakamura,
2015), somewhat ‘toxic’ to the online environment (Risam, 2015; Stewart, 2016), or “a garbage
dumpster fire of trash” (Herzog, 2018). Public controversies offer a prime context for observing the
construction of social life, because actors involved in them are constantly negotiating and
renegotiating the categories, definitions and actions that constitute the fabric of the social
(Venturini, 2012, p.2). The goal of analysing a controversy is to make the complexity of the debate
legible, and to reflect on the threads that generate it. Because of ‘messiness’ resulting from trying to
describe a controversy, a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies is preferable.
With this logic in mind, a mixed method approach is taken in this project. Two datasets were built:
firstly, a collection of online articles and ‘thinkpieces’ discussing call-out culture, and secondly a set
of tweets collected ‘live’ as an example of call-out as it was occurring on the platform. The following
paragraphs describe the data collection and analysis process.

Data collection: Articles and thinkpieces

A corpus of online articles and ‘thinkpieces’, discussing the practice of online call-outs and call-out
culture was constructed. Articles were initially found through a query on the Google search engine,
containing the words “call-out” and “culture”, allowing for different versions of the same term such
as “call out” and “callout”. An “incognito” browser window was used to avoid the personalisation of
results. When a relevant article emerged, its title and URL were initially copied into a spreadsheet.
Moreover, if the article itself mentions or directly links to other relevant online pieces, these were

9
also examined and recorded.

In order to find less recent articles, searches for the term ‘call-out’/’callout’ and ‘culture’ were
brought out on a set of online journalism sites, such as Medium.com and the New York Times
website. While many pieces were identified in this manner, not all of the results of this search
method were relevant to the research question and therefore not all results could be included in the
corpus. For instance, the Medium query for “call out” returned the following article: “Calling Out the
SEC” (Malekan, 2019). However, a brief review of the article content revealed that, while the term
‘calling out’ is used, the focus of the article is blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, and that in
this context ‘call out’ does not refer to the online phenomenon of public condemnation of an act,
but rather meaning ‘finding fault with’, without the public and morally grounded criticism that
characterises calling out. The presence of such results generates the need for a qualitative
judgement by the researcher of which texts should be included in the data sample. Through this data
collection method, links to 103 unique articles discussing call-out culture and its implications were
found.

Collecting data through search engines: Bias, limitations and opportunity

Search engines constitute the ‘entry points’ to the Web for the majority of the Western world. Hillis,
Petit and Jarrett (2013) report that in July 2011, 91% of online searches globally were mediated
through Google (p.3), and the percentage is likely to have increased since (StatCounter, 2019). In
other words, search engines have become gatekeepers to culture and knowledge as it is stored
online. Given that this project aims to investigate an online controversy, considering all the
perspectives that constitute it, an issue of potential algorithmic bias emerges.

In fact, the algorithm that determines which results appear first, and are therefore more prominent,
is Google’s private property and kept hidden, and thus a closed ‘black box’. The resulting problem is
summarised by Pasquale (2016): “without knowing what Google actually does when it ranks sites,
we cannot assess [...] when it is biasing results to favor its own commercial interests”. Even with
regards to call-out culture, there is no simple way to determine whether the Google search engine is
silencing certain voices and over-representing others.

Strategies can be enacted to deal with the representation issues generated by the characteristics
and possible bias built into the algorithm. For instance, while the typical Google user only considers
results from the first two pages (Jansen, Bernard and Pooch, 2001), the articles on call-out culture

10
collected were found by systematically investigating as many of the results given as possible,
venturing well beyond the first few pages and following the links between articles, therefore moving
away from the Google algorithm and relying on the connections between content.

While accounting for issues of representation is undoubtedly important, the affordances of the
search engine algorithm might contribute to the researcher’s understanding of the disparity of
support given to different perspectives within the call-out controversy. In fact, as the Google search
engine is one of main channel through information is processed and distributed, the perspectives
and voices that are boosted by the algorithm are likely to both reflect and determine which are the
more prevalent and influential within the controversy. Venturini (2012) argues that, in mapping a
social controversy, researchers should be concerned not with ‘first degree’ objectivity, i.e. matter of
facts on which all actors can agree, but with ‘second degree’ objectivity, which stands for “the full
range of oppositions around matters of concern’’ (p.4). All perspectives should be represented when
discussing a controversy, and disagreeing minorities are fundamental in shaping the discussion and
furthering knowledge. However, if many actors subscribe to a viewpoint, and an article representing
this viewpoint is prominent on search engines, this should be considered and represented when
describing the call-out controversy.

Relying on search engines and the Google algorithm generates both limitations and affordances. As
there is no way of knowing if some results were omitted entirely or hidden, it is possible that some
perspectives are not reflected in the results. By perusing the results with attention and
systematicity, the consequences of this were minimised as much as possible in the data collection
process. Moreover, the ranking of information enacted by the algorithm is likely to both reflect and
be constitutive of public opinion, and this should be considered when describing the existing
perspectives on call-out culture.

Qualitative analysis
Once the corpus was complete, each article was downloaded in pdf format and imported into the
qualitative analysis software Nvivo (2018). Images present in the articles were reproduced in the pdf
files, as to maintain integrity as much as possible. Examples of specific call-out cases described in the
data were coded for the actors involved, the call-out topic, and the evidence of the call-out. An
example of this coding is shown in table 1:

Example Actors Topic Evidence

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 BBQ Becky: white Private citizens Racism Viral video
woman calling police
because Black people are
barbecuing

Kylie Jenner is criticised Famous person Cultural appropriation; Social media post
for sporting cornrows racism
hairstyle

Table 1. Example of coding of call-out cases.

A grounded theory approach to coding (Corbin and Strauss, 1990) was taken to investigate both the
call-out practice and the controversy of call-out culture. As all articles take a stance regarding the
practice, either criticising or praising it, the arguments making up both positive and negative stances
were coded. The coding then focused on the motivations behind call-outs and their perceived
toxicity. Analysis of the content showed that these included issues such as virality of the call-out,
calling out as a performance of political purity and knowledge, and the presence of evidence in the
form of videos, images and social media posts which lead to misinformation. Consequences of calling
out discussed were also identified: many articles mention ‘online shaming’, as well as abuse and
bullying as elements that follow a call-out. The affordances of Nvivo were employed to
systematically record such themes. Coding nodes were created to represent and group them as they
emerged from the data. The result of the coding in presented in the analysis section, which
constitutes an overview of salient themes and includes quotes from the data.

Data collection: Case study #LICENZIA_LUCA_MORISI_

To complement the investigation of the call-out practice and culture based on online articles and
thinkpieces, one specific case of call-out occurring at the time of research was selected and ‘live
data’ on it collected. On April 21, 2019, the hashtag ‘#licenzia_LUCA_MORISI_” (meaning ‘fire Luca
Morisi’1), calling for the firing of the social media manager of deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini,
began trending on Twitter in all major Italian cities and was listed as one of the platform’s ‘trending
topics’ in Italy, remaining on the list for several hours. That morning, Luca Morisi had posted on his
Facebook page a picture of the minister, who is also the Secretary of the right-wing party Lega Nord
(Northern League), holding an assault rifle accompanied by the following message:

1
All text originally in Italian concerning the case study has been translated by the researcher.

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“Have you noticed that they are doing anything they can to disparage the League2? The European
elections are coming and they’ll come up with anything to stop the Captain3.
But we have weapons and helmets! Full speed ahead, Happy Easter! ;)”

Many took to Twitter to criticise the minister and especially Luca Morisi, the author of the post. He
was called out for his words and choice of image, both described as inciting violence and lacking in
sensitivity (in fact, the image was posted on Easter Sunday and shortly after news broke of terrorist
attacks in Sri Lanka churches). The hashtag is recorded as an Italy-wide trending topic starting from
11.08 pm on April 21st (Trendinalia Italia, 2019). Tweets tagged #licenzia_LUCA_MORISI_ (or
#licenzia_LUCA_MORISI, accounting for a possible spelling difference) began to be collected through
TAGS v6.1.9 (Hawksey, 2018), at 10.00 pm that same day, shortly before it was considered a
trending topic.

Image 1. Screenshot of Luca Morisi’s post on Facebook that sparked the call-out on Twitter.

2
Referring to The Northern League, Salvini’s political party.
3
“The Captain” or ‘Il Capitano” refers to Salvini.

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The TAGS archive automatically updated, collecting new tweets every hour until April 25th at 02.15
pm, when the hashtag had no longer been trending for at least 3 days. In total, 24.595 tweets were
collected, including retweets: the most widely shared tweets repeat themselves in the corpus,
therefore giving a sense of which were the most popular. The data collected includes the tweet
content, the time of creation and collection, and other metadata such as user’s location and tweet
URL. TAGS relies on Twitter’s streaming API, which gives access to newly published tweets matching
specific criteria (such as a hashtag). The volume of tweets returned never exceeds 1% of all tweets
published on Twitter (Kumar et al., 2014, p.20); however, given the scale of the hashtag, it is
reasonable to expect that the vast majority of tweets tagged #licenzia_LUCA_MORISI_ published
during the relevant time period were collected.

Twitter data collected from ‘open’ Twitter accounts is legally considered public. Nevertheless, issues
of contexts and authors’ perception should be taken into account when scraping social media data.
In this case, the tweets collected were all posted as part of a hashtag and therefore within a wider,
public conversation: hashtags, in fact, function as “searchable talk” (Zappavigna, 2012), and have the
goal to make the tweet findable and as visible as possible. Therefore, tweets posted with such a
hashtag can be considered public in nature (Wallace and Townsend, 2016, p.5). All Twitter accounts
examined are public and visible, as are the political opinions of the individuals who run them. Users
were in fact encouraging the diffusion of their tweets. Thus, there is no reason to imagine authors
would be exposed to harm following inclusion of tweets in this piece of work.

Data analysis
The tweets and their content were firstly analysed through Excel in order to determine how tweets
fluctuated across time. The number of tweets posted each day on the hashtag was assessed,
compared and visualised in a line graph. The TAGSExplorer tool (Hawksey, 2016) was employed for
further analysis. TAGSExplorer is an interface which enables the visualisation of Twitter data stored
in a TAGS archive. The conversations are represented through networks of replies, mentions and
retweets, and the most active actors within a conversation are identified. Therefore, through this
tool, it was possible to determine which actors participated in the hashtag and related controversy
and who the most active users were; once a list was obtained, their role was identified based on the
information on their profile page (such as journalist, political blogger, or activist). The results were
visualised to summarise the characteristics of the call-out case analysed. Moreover, the content of
the tweets and the context of the call-out case were qualitatively analysed to identify themes of
evidence, truth and misinformation as well as performance and attention.

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4. Analysis

The aim of this section is to present and discuss the results of the analysis of the data collected. An
overview of the stances and narratives making up the call-out controversy is followed by an
examination of the motivations of users and issues that underlie it. The analysis is based on the
qualitative analysis of 103 articles discussing call-out culture. Finally, the findings are applied to the
call-out case study #licenzia_LUCA_MORISI_.

4.1. Understanding the call-out controversy

The articles analysed reveal the existence of a controversy concerning the way calling out is used
across different social media (most commonly Twitter, Facebook and Instagram), and cultural areas
(most articles take a US perspective, but the Chinese and Singapore contexts are also discussed). The
tendency for call-outs to spread beyond the boundaries of single platforms and to have important
consequences across and beyond digital spaces is acknowledged. A range of positions towards
calling out emerge, and it is the aim of this section to give an overview of these, by answering the
question:

What stances constitute the call-out controversy?

The positive, negative and ambiguous stances which make up the controversy are examined. The
tensions and connections linking the arguments emerging from the texts are discussed in the
following sections. Out of 103 articles analysed, 65 took a clearly negative stance towards call-out
culture and the call-out practice. Only 25 were positive, while 13 were classified as ambiguous, as
they contained both praise and criticism. The negative stance is clearly the most widespread;
however, almost a fourth of the articles argued for a positive outlook on the call-out culture
phenomenon, showing the existence of a vocal minority that supports calling out.

Nostalgic narrative and toxicity discourse

The most common narrative in the data is that call-out culture is ineffective in its efforts to enact
social change, and has instead a range of negative consequences, particularly within the social
justice movement. In 31 of the articles analysed, the call-out practice is described as creating a toxic
environment for activists and society at large. Risam (2015) defines ‘toxic’ as “a cultural code for the
irritants and pollutants that disrupt our lived experience” (p.1). Perception of toxicity online exists
beyond call-out culture, particularly linked to ‘trolling’ practices (Phillips, 2015); in the data, calling
out is identified as one of a set of behaviours leading to the degradation and toxicity of digital

15
spaces. A nostalgic narrative emerges, which identifies social media as a place that has become
increasingly dangerous and negative. Call-outs are seen as part of this process, and are thought to
generate toxicity because they lead to criticism and condemnation of certain actions: “social media
[...] used to be a harmless place for oversharing. Then it evolved into something else. It became a
public courtroom where we play judge, jury and executioner” (Arsua)4. Therefore, calling out is
identified as having introduced shame and criticism to the ‘garden of Eden’ of social media, and thus
contributed to a feeling of toxicity, of a space becoming increasingly corrupted and difficult to
navigate without exposing oneself to harm.

Criticism enacted through call-outs is seen is often perceived as needlessly ferocious and often
disproportionate to the action criticised. In such cases, it is described as ‘bullying’, a particularly toxic
consequence of calling out. An example of such an instance is given in the data: when a young
woman shared a photo on Twitter which showed that she wore a cheongsam, a traditional Chinese
dress, to her high school prom in May 2018, she was faced with considerable backlash (Murray,
2018). The original tweet went viral, with responses ranging from support to insults. Her clothing
choice became the catalyst for a discussion on cultural appropriation and cultural sensitivity. This
case is described as a salient example of how call-out culture can generate disproportionate and out
of control responses:

“The ferociousness of call-out culture’s most zealous disciples is becoming increasingly

disproportionate to the alleged offenses of their victims. For a textbook example, look no further
than the recent controversy surrounding a young woman’s decision to wear a cheongsam (a
Chinese-style dress) to her high school prom. [...] A young high school student with no malicious
intent does not deserve a rabid social media mob. But somehow, that’s always what happens” (Kirk).

When insults and vitriol are part of a call-out, many describe it as a form of cyberbullying, and as
such completely unacceptable: “much liberal culture still sees social justice bullying [...] as well-
intentioned anger gone too far. It’s time to see it simply as bullying.” (Young). The perception is that
call-out culture is unforgiving, and thus does not leave space for the alleged transgressors to learn
from their mistakes and apologise. This idea is often accompanied by mentions of toxicity: “I feel like
a lot of the toxicity in progressivism comes down to refusing people the ability to learn” (Duca). In
this vein, the problem of call-out culture is identified in its lack of compassion towards transgressors,

4
This is a quote from the data analysed. The name in brackets, ‘Arsua’, refers to the author. Subsequent
quotes will be presented in the same format. A complete list of the articles quoted can be found under
References.

16
to the point of their dehumanisation: “call-out culture teaches to banish and dispose of individuals
rather than to engage with them as people with complicated stories and histories” (Ahmad).

Call-out culture as exploitation and censorship

Alongside the characterisation of calling out as a punitive practice, a narrative emerged regarding
the way the mechanisms of call-out culture can be exploited with negative consequences. The
outrage that call-outs spark becomes a tool for those who wish to increase their visibility and
dominate public discourse. By being constantly under attack for their comments or actions, public
figures ensure that they are discussed on social media and by the press as often as possible. Most
notably, this is recognised as a strategy employed by Donald Trump, whose “early popularity was
built almost entirely on the free media attention he received by people and news outlets criticising
his comments. Far from this making him drop out of the race, it actually meant that he was able to
reach a much larger pool of people” (Murray).

At the same time, the outrage generated by calling out is perceived to create an unhealthy and
stifling online environment for private users who do not wish to be in the public eye but find
themselves criticised. Many authors in the data claim to feel fearful of participating in public
discourse or producing media because of the potential backlash. As a result, the fear of being called
out is identified as a form of censorship: “call-out culture hinders freedom of speech, as the person
does not want to experience call-out culture again so they are then careful of what to say and who
to say it to” (@theawkwardactivist).

The 65 articles taking a negative stance paint a picture in which call-outs increase the toxicity of
online environments, as users are exposed to criticism and bullying. The focus is on the harm done
to the person being called out; the fear of incurring in the wrath of an ‘angry mob’ of social media
users is presented as strong enough to discourage some to participate in public discourse on
platforms. Moreover, because of the widespread desire to point out all that is wrong, plenty of
attention is given is to whomever says something outrageous, with the consequence that call-out
culture is exploited by public figures wishing to increase their visibility and dominate the news cycle.
Ultimately, these articles present call-out culture as a social phenomenon that is counterproductive
beyond repair; however, as the following paragraphs explore, this is not the only narrative present in
the data.

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Counter-narrative: Issues of race and oppression
Almost a fourth of the articles analysed actively reject criticism of the call-out phenomenon and its
labeling as ‘toxic’. This criticism is rather framed as a subtle way for typically powerful and visible
groups (in particular ethnic majorities and cis-heterosexual individuals) to put a stop to the
subversion of power dynamics generated by the call-out practice. When this perspective is
considered alongside the negative narrative, the call-out controversy reveals itself as a struggle for
determining when, how and who, amongst identity groups, is morally entitled to employ the power
of calling out.

Articles who reject a negative view of call-out culture put forward a counter-narrative, subverting
that of toxicity, bullying and censorship. These authors, often members of marginalised groups,
underline that calling out began as a tool of racial and sexual minorities, who harnessed the power
of online visibility and community to stop harassment and other instances of oppression. Within the
counter-narrative, this remains the the core purpose of the practice: to intervene in instances in
which the existing oppressive power structures of society, which marginalise women and people of
colour, are being reproduced. Considering this function, criticising call-out culture is then framed as
an effort by a white and cis-heterosexual majority that benefits from existing social inequalities to
ensure that status quo is maintained, not disrupted by call-outs: “most of the people labelling call-
out culture toxic are white and cisgender” (Senne). Marginalised communities see criticism aimed at
call-out culture as an effort to silence and repress the power of calling out, and by extensions,
devalue their identities: “marginalized people are demonized by the branding of “call out culture” as
an aggressive display of moral superiority” (Sae-Nazaari). Negative narratives on call-out culture
focus on the difficult consequences and hurt that the practice creates for those who are called out.
The counter-narrative rejects this perspective, suggesting that focusing on the person being called
out invalidates oppressed groups’ feelings of anger and injustice. By inciting compassion and
empathy towards those who oppress, some marginalised supporters of call-out culture feel that they
are invited to “play nice with oppressors and be careful for the feelings of the people that hurt
[them]” (Fairbanks).

Thus, criticism of call-out culture is felt to reproduce the very cultural devaluing of marginalised
identities that call-outs aim to interrupt. Discourse employed to criticise call-out culture is
highlighted as the tool through which this silencing is enacted. In particular, the trope of toxicity is
identified as a subtle way to indicate that minorities’ anger (particularly Black women’s), instantiated
in the calling out practice, is unwelcome, unnecessary and counterproductive. The terms ‘toxic’ and

18
‘toxicity’ become a “dog-whistle code for women of color (especially black) activists” (Cross), a less
overt version of the ‘angry Black woman’ stereotype (Risam, 2015; Ashley, 2014).

Furthering the counter-narrative, a more positive image of call-out culture is constructed. The
practice is described as necessary, as it empowers minorities and makes their concerns heard: “call-
out culture is actually one of the only ways many marginalised groups can be visible, recognised, and
navigate discrimination [...] a platform for the previously unheard” (Senne). The argument for the
necessity of calling out is further supported by the idea that the practice is used as a last resort for
minorities subjected to harassment: “calling out is not a sport that marginalised people engage in for
fun, but comes from a place of desperation” (Fairbanks). The call-out controversy is a struggle in
which the legitimisation of employing call-outs is debated. This counter-narrative rivendicates the
legitimacy in two ways: firstly, by underlining that calling out is and should only be practiced when it
is necessary, i.e. in cases of problematic behaviour where there is seemingly no other way to change
the discourse and where safety of a group or individual is threatened; secondly, and perhaps most
importantly, that it is each marginalised individual’s right to determine when such a situation arises,
and that the action should be considered legitimate even if this perspective is not shared by
everyone. The counter-narrative points to systemic oppression to explain the perceived cultural
toxicity of call-out culture; this shows that discussion of the call-out controversy cannot be
disentangled from issues of identity, and in particular race.

Ambiguous stance: Calling out as a misused practice

13 articles analysed are neither fully positive or negative towards the call-out practice, but often
take arguments from both sides. Inviting a more nuanced perspective, authors of these pieces
encourage readers to consider “the wide middle ground between pushovers and bullies” (Wildfire).
These articles, while acknowledging the origin of call-outs as a tool of self-defense for marginalised
people, propose a third perspective: calling out as a practice is often abused, twisted, and capable of
generating complex situations. It is claimed that call-outs are no longer used against harassment but
are employed by social media users to “attack individuals, without addressing systemic oppression,
to build a name for themselves” (Burns).

These articles, in acknowledging both strengths and flaws of call-out culture, move beyond a black-
and-white view of the practice. In so doing, the idea emerges that the power of call-outs, rather than
intrinsically toxic, is no longer only used to interrupt oppressive discourse, but often put to wrong
use: “Calling out is a vital tool for working against oppression in our day-to-day lives. It is however,

19
often misused by people who don’t directly experience the oppression” (Weber). Some of the
articles begin to address the possible underlying motivations that lead to that misuse, and often give
advice on how to ensure that a call-out is done appropriately. This includes checking one’s
motivations, which should not be to embarrass an individual or to prove that one is a good “ally to
minorities”, with progressive and ‘pure’ political ideas. However, a systematic analysis of how the
call-out practice came to be ‘misused’, considering not only users’ motivations but also of the effect
of the structure of the platforms on which call-outs occur, is lacking. It is the aim of the remainder of
this chapter to address this gap, and consider the issues which underlie the ‘messiness’ of the call-
out controversy.

4.2. Understanding call-out culture: Underlying issues

The aim of this section is to illustrate the main themes that emerged from the qualitative analysis of
the corpus of articles discussing call-out culture, and what they reveal about the mechanisms
underlying the call-out controversy. It will address the research question:

Why did call-outs come to be considered ‘toxic’ and ‘misused’?

Two groups of issues have been identified as constituting the basis for much of the ‘toxicity’ that is
perceived to characterise call-out culture: firstly, problems regarding evidence, truth and
misinformation; secondly, issues of performance, competition and attention. In particular, the latter
group of themes is also identified as responsible for the ‘misuse’ of calling out. The following
sections examine these themes and their role within call-out culture.

4.2.1. Evidence, truth and misinformation

35 out of the 103 articles coded contained discussion of evidence, truth and misinformation as one
of the issues relevant to call-out culture. The discussion of this topic takes different forms
throughout the data: some authors focus on the collection of evidence from individuals’ digital
footprint, while others underline the use of video recording in public spaces; issues of
misinformation arise when evidence is absent, taken out of context or used as a starting point to
identify those involved, breaching privacy.

The centrality of digital evidence to call-out culture: ‘Collecting receipts’

Evidence supporting the call-out is crucial, to the point that the practice of finding proof of
oppressive behaviour has become part of the language of call-out culture, referred to as ‘collecting

20
receipts’. Collecting receipts means forming “a trail of digital evidence in the form of screenshots of
messages and social media activity that points to problematic behaviour” (Senne).

The practice of collecting digital images as evidence to support criticism on social media appears to
date back to the origin of the call-out, when it began as a self-defense tool by women of colour
receiving threats. This is explained in an article defending the call-out practice: “for Black femmes,
call-outs may be the only way to stop a violent motherfucker from sending you threats from multiple
accounts. Particularly on these social media platforms that never listen to our complaints, even
when we have screencapped evidence of threats” (Riley). This mention of “screencapped” evidence
closely matches the definition of collecting “screenshots” as a practice typical of call out culture,
showing that ‘receipts’ have been central to call-out culture from its beginning.
The action of collecting images of digital traces (social media posts and messages) as proof to
support a call-out is understood in very different ways throughout the data examined. In articles
defending call-out culture, the practice is described as a last resort, a much needed defense
employed by black women against harassers. Moreover, it is said the providing of evidence of the
problems in the form of screenshots was necessary but still often not enough to generate positive
change. In comparison, an article arguing that call-out culture ‘threatens truth’ describes how,
following a case of an American high school student who was filmed writing racist epiteths on a
whiteboard, digital evidence of racist behaviour amongst other students was sought, with significant
consequences: “screenshots were pulled up, Twitter accounts were dug through, and Instagram
feeds were searched — it seemed as though people were just looking for anything they could use as
evidence to either start drama or get a student in trouble” (Gross and Wojcik). A contrast arises
between the latter and former quote on evidence-finding practices: in the former the search for
evidence is described as the sharing of truth with the hope of positive change; in the latter, instead,
as negative, excessive, and unnecessarily petty.

Criticism of the practice of finding evidence by scouring an individual’s digital trace, especially when
many years have lapsed between the time the trace was produced and the present, is a frequent
trope in the data. This occurs in response to the emergence, for each internet user, of a digital
memory, which is “highly detailed, ever-expanding, and permanent” (Burkell, 2016, p. 17). This
includes not only data willingly shared by users, but also what is created by others, termed ‘data
shadows’ (Koops, 2011). The permanence of this information challenges the ‘right to be forgotten’,
necessary in the formation of one’s self-narrative and identity (Burkell, 2016). A piece titled “call-out
culture: doing more harm than good?”, dealing with the difficulty of having one’s past actions

21
remembered in the age of the internet, criticises those who search for transgressions, finding in the
practice a refusal to acknowledge the possibility for individuals to grow and learn.

It is considered unfair to suffer backlash for statements and actions dating back “months or even
years” (Haider). Other authors raise concern for what this practice might mean for young people
who have grown up using social media: “the messy, ugly parts of this generation’s childhood will live
on forever, etched in cyberstone [...]. Young adults can now be condemned for words their 9th grade
selves used” (Paresky). The author cites the case of Kyler Murray, an American football player, who
had used homophobic slurs in tweets to friends at age 14 and 15. After he became notorious in 2018
for winning the Heisman trophy, one of the highest individual awards given by National Collegiate
Athletic Association, screenshots of the tweets began to circulate. He apologised, and the call-out
sparked a conversation about the need for leniency when considering the mistakes made by
adolescents. The data shows that there the availability of one’s past interactions online is keenly felt
by users, who are aware and worry about the existence of this digital memory: “the past cannot
readily be erased” (Melo). This generates a sense of unfairness and threatened privacy, as words
shared online years ago, in a different context and often to a smaller audience, could suddenly be
brought to the attention of a much wider public.

Viral content as a threat to truth

Evidence in the form of screenshots is not the only way in which truth and misinformation come into
play within the discussion surrounding call-outs. Throughout the data, a narrative emerges
concerning the way in which call-outs based on false information become viral. Examples are given
of call-outs which were widely shared, gathered significant support and generated a flood of
responses with significant consequences for all those involved, but which were based on false,
misinterpreted or unclear information. This type of call-out is perceived and described as particularly
uncontrollable, dangerous, and unfair, or ‘toxic’.

Examples are given in the articles to show how misinformation, or at the very least unclarity, co-
occurs with seemingly unstoppable call-out campaigns. One piece, titled “Call-out culture is a toxic
garbage dumpster fire”, authored by Katie Herzog, cites the case of the outrage sparked by an early
2018 rumour that Harper’s Magazine was going to publish an article revealing the identity of the
author of the notorious “shitty media men” list, an anonymous Google Doc file which emerged in
late 2017 listing men working in the media that should be avoided due to sexual harassment
(Corcione, 2018). The rumour began on Twitter, and was not confirmed by any official source.

22
Immediately, an intense call-out campaign began on the platform, aimed at the magazine and at the
piece’s supposed author. Writer Nicole Cliffe encouraged others who were writing pieces for the
magazine to pull them, and pledged to pay them instead. Many took her up on her offer, while at
least one advertiser ceased to collaborate with Harper’s Magazine. Katie Roiphe, the alleged author
of the piece, claimed she was not intending to out the creator of the list. Ultimately, there was no
clarity regarding the truth of the rumour. However, the backlash and consequences were
considerable, especially for the magazine. In the article analysed, this scandal is proposed as an
example of how call out culture can move before information is confirmed, and the call-out is
described as unstoppable despite the lack of clarity (Herzog).

The perceived toxicity of such call-outs is directly linked to the way they are threatening truth: the
claims made in the call-out circulate so widely that no attempt to debunk them or point out the lack
of context or evidence to support accusations will reach the same level of visibility. This perception
has been confirmed through empirical research: rumors circulate more widely than corrections or
debunking attempts (Friggeri et al. 2014). One of the articles collected describes the consequences
of this phenomenon as creating a “scary reality in which you don’t need any sort of evidence to call
someone out” (Gross and Wojcik). As long as a social media post receives attention, it will have
consequences, regardless of the veracity of its content. While social media users who are more
digitally literate might not trust the viral call-out, and realise that the call-out was based on false
information, many will not (Bartlett and Miller, 2011).

In the data, discussions of virality are often paired with the idea of a ‘social media mob’, indicating
the large crowd of users who retweet, respond and share call-outs. Rheingold (2003) introduced the
term ‘smart mobs’ to indicate, broadly, groups of people who act together enabled by
communication technology. Such mobs can hold great power through collective action; and it is this
power that call-out culture harnesses. Herzog’s article makes use of the mob metaphor when
discussing viral call-outs based on unclear information:

“There’s a name for this behavior: witch hunts. Someone is accused, judged, and condemned for an
alleged or apparent transgression, and the townspeople on Facebook and Twitter grab their
pitchforks and rush to the burn pile. There may be little evidence to support the prevailing narrative,
but that hardly matters. Social media mobs [....] are almost always misinformed”.

Terminology such as “pile ons”, references to angry social media mobs who seek revenge and

23
disregard truth, and metaphors relying on the ‘witch hunt’ imagery emerge in many other parts of
the data. An article examining call-out culture in academia by Suzanna Danuta Walters describes the
case of Rebecca Tuvel, a philosopher who wrote a peer-reviewed article on transracialism, issues of
identity and biological determinism. In the piece, she draws a comparison between racial and gender
classification, suggesting that the decision to ‘change one’s race’ should be as accepted as that to
determine one’s gender. After it was published, an online petition demanding the retraction of the
article began to circulate. Walters cites journalist Jesse Singal regarding the inaccuracy of the letter
accompanying the petition: “every single one of the hundreds of signatories on the open letter now
has their name on a document that mischaracterizes the work of one of their colleagues [...] perhaps
fueled by the dynamics of online shaming and piling on” (emphasis added). References to the
imagery of shaming piles and witch hunts are often accompanied by the idea that the structures of
social media platforms, designed to maximise sharing and virality, and the dynamics they generate,
are to blame. Viral content is seen as leading to a loss of individual critical thought and to the
disregarding of nuance, and therefore of more subtle truths, in favour of a black-and-white,
extremised view of a situation.

Similarly, the nuance of satirical content can often be misunderstood, leading to further
misinformation. Social media posts intended as humourous can be taken as truth when they are
shared beyond their original context, eventually generating a call-out, as they reach those who do
not have the digital literacy or contextual knowledge to identify the information as false and
satirical. Crystal Abidin provides an example of this in an online article discussing public shaming in
Singapore, concerning a parody page set up in 2011 as a satirical version of Singapore’s public
transport operator, SMRT. The authors solicited feedback from commuters through Facebook
updates mimicking official announcements, in a sarcastic tone. Abidin recounts how the satirical
aspect was not noticed by some users: “many commentators expressed disbelief at the transport
operator’s unprofessionalism [,,,] while others sincerely called out the state’s apparent complacency
in its governance”. From the data, the idea emerges that the virality of content leads to a
disregarding of truth, the proliferation of misinterpretation and misinformation, and extremist views
of the issue at the centre of the call-out.

The emergence of a link between virality and false, manipulated or missing knowledge has important
consequences for the information consumption practices of internet users. Visibility is central for the
success of a call-out and any other online content; if content that is successful, and thus has tangible
consequences, is perceived as uncontrollable, potentially false and generally low quality, the image

24
of social media as a creative and trustworthy “free marketplace of ideas” collapses (Qiu et al, 2019).
Due to the conflation of virality and falsity, trust is disrupted in the quality of viral information
consumed, as well as in those who participate in virality in general and in the practice of calling out
specifically. Confusion arises as the assumption that what is shared within our network should be
true (Schroyens, 1997; Scherchan, Nepal and Paris, 2013) clashes with the awareness of highly visible
cases of viral content lacking evidence or context. The lexicon of toxicity is employed to summarise
this disruption of trust and confusion.

Peer surveillance: visual documentation and manipulated content

The last intersection between evidence, truth and call-out culture concerns the use of recorded
visual documentation as the basis of call-outs. Analysis showed an awareness of the role of
smartphone cameras in enabling recording at all times, in both public and private spaces. This
practice is framed and discussed in two ways in the data: firstly, and more commonly, as a tool to
create viral content. In such cases, camera phones have most often been used to record videos of
private citizens committing actions that break with accepted social norms. Such videos are widely
shared and taken out of context; individuals depicted are often exposed to a dangerous loss of
privacy. Secondly, the practice of recording is framed as a way to obtain video evidence of abuses of
power, for instance in cases of police brutality, as an empowering practice and starting point of
human rights movements and protests. The contrast between these two narratives constitutes a
further example of the identity-based conflict surrounding the way call-out culture is understood
culturally: whether as useful or disadvantageous, legitimate or illegitimate.

A range of examples are given in the article in which content recorded by private citizens in public
spaces became viral and generated call-outs. Abidin describes how the Singapore-based online
publication STOMP (an acronym for Straits Times Online Mobile Print) encourages users to submit
content, in the form of pictures and videos. A whole category, titled “Singapore Seen”, collects
evidence of citizens breaking the rules, including sections such as “drivers from hell”. Video content
is taken as an undeniable form of evidence, and peer surveillance is encouraged as a form of citizen
journalism (Jiow and Morales, 2015). The information contained by videos is at times used to enact
vigilante justice, as social media users work to identify the actors involved and release their private
information. As Abidin writes: “careless drivers are humiliated through a full display of their license
plates and vehicle makes; injured commuters are photographed [...]; young people’s bodies and
social relations are policed and disciplined into eternal chastity”. The possibility to record any scene
of daily life becomes a way to hold anyone accountable and ensure that social norms, based in

25
idealised understandings of politeness, modesty and virtue, are maintained. Through this
transformation of everyday banality into potentially viral content, enabled by the omnipresence of
video-recording technology, anonymous citizens are potentially exposed to public shaming and
vitriol.

What viral videos and images show is often taken as indisputable evidence. However, the data
provided examples of how visual content can be manipulated, and the truth with it. Firstly, images
can be edited or taken out of context: in 2014, a photo depicting a man in a Singapore National
Service uniform asleep on a train, while an elderly lady was left standing, became viral (Abidin). It
later emerged that the image had been edited to hide the vacant seats around the man, and thus to
create as much outrage as possible. Similarly, when the movie Black Panther was released in early
2018, images were shared on Twitter depicting injured White people, with captions claiming the
violence had occurred at showings of the movie, which featured a cast of Black actors (Lyric). The
photographs had been manipulated to construct an anti-Black narrative. Within and beyond call-out
culture, images constitute simultaneously the primary form of evidence offered to support claims,
and information that is constantly manipulated, edited and taken out of context. This paradoxical
role of images and video recordings generates confusion, and thus, toxicity. Even when evidence is
recognised as fake, toxic consequences arise. in fact, misinformation impacts perception and
memory, with lasting effects on attitude (Sacchi et al., 2007). Moreover, as with other types of
misinformation, the distribution of fake images often surpsasses that of any correction (Friggeri et al.
2014). As call-out culture relies on ‘collecting receipts’, the facility of image manipulation and its
consequences strongly contribute to the perception of call-out culture as toxic.

While most articles analysed framed the use of images and videos as evidence as worrying instances
of peer surveillance, a different narrative emerged. Emma Grey Ellis, in her article titled “The case
for viral ‘callout’ culture”, considers the importance of video evidence in documenting racism as it
occurs in the everyday, and thus in furthering the cause of equality. Recordings depicting encounters
between racial minorities and law enforcement in the U.S. have been “key to the activism of Black
Lives Matter and other groups documenting police brutality and other forms of violence against
minorities”. In such cases, virality is not seen as an enemy of truth but rather a tool of social
progress. The author argues that the same is true for videos that do not depict police brutality, but
rather racist actions by private citizens, who become the subject of internet memes as a result of
virality. The contrast between these two narratives (viral videos as breaching privacy versus as a tool
of social progress) shows that, once again, the stances making up the call-out culture controversy

26
are the expression of a struggle for control of when and how the affordances of new technologies
(such as video recordings) should be employed; in this case, as often occurs, the struggle is a racial
one.

An example of empowering use of camera phones is the case of ‘BBQ Becky’. The nickname was
given to a woman who was recorded calling the police because a group of Black people was
barbecuing nearby. The video became viral and BBQ Becky a meme, with this name acting as a
signature of the topic and event as it spread across the web, from mainstream media to social
network feeds (Leskovec et al., 2009). While the term ‘meme’ has been criticised as imprecise
(Phillips, 2015, p.35), this is how the phenomenon of BBQ Becky is understood as a cultural item. On
the website knowyourmeme.com, the BBQ Becky meme is described as a product of Black Twitter
(Clark, 2014): users began editing the woman into photographs of civil rights milestones and other
salient moments for Black culture, mocking the absurdity of her attempt to police Black lives (Image
4).

Citing the case of BBQ Becky, Ellis argues that “by circulating examples of people of color’s lived
experiences—for a wider audience than has ever been possible—these videos are remaking the
image of the American racist”. In so doing, a different perspective on the possibility to record daily
life emerges: rather than viewing viral video evidence as a tool of peer surveillance, enabling the
enforcement of social norms through public shaming, recording life is seen as an empowering act,
and the potential for virality as generating much-needed visibility and awareness of social issues.

27
Image 2. An example of the BBQ Becky meme: the woman is edited into an image depicting civil rights activist Rosa Parks.

4.2.2. Performance, competition and attention

In addition to the themes of truth, evidence and misinformation already identified, another group of
issues was identified as contributing to the perceived danger and toxicity of call-out culture. This
chapter tackles the theme of calling out as a performance: the practice relies on the presence of an
audience to enact change, and in many cases this is perceived as leading to deceit and
inauthenticity. This problem is then considered within the framework of the attention economy, in
which call-out culture and its ability to generate attention are harnessed to win the competition for
visibility.

Call-outs are a public performance: power and authenticity

In the data, call-outs are often described as a “social” or “public” performance put on by social
platform users:

“Somewhere along the line, call outs started shifting in purpose. Where, once, they were used as
tools against abuse, people began building a name for themselves through call outs. The personal

28
connection was lost and it became a social performance.” (Burns).

The proposal by Goffman (1959) that individuals perform their identity through the flow of social
interaction has been applied to online environments, in which self-awareness increases and
performance of one’s identity is carefully constructed (Chan, 2000; boyd and Heer, 2006; Pearson,
2009). The trope of call-outs-as-performance returns again and again throughout the data, with
commentators presenting it as call-out culture’s main issue: “it can feel like the performance itself is
more significant than the content of the call-out” (Ahmad). Performative call-outs are thought to be
based on dishonest motivations, to lack authenticity and compassion, and to have far more negative
than positive consequences: “the people who are doing it with the sole intent of getting a pat on the
head and a treat are dangerous. “Allies” who perform theater for a reward (real or imagined) do
damage to the communities they’re supposed to be allied with” (Rodriguez). Issues of performance
are discussed in 41 of the 103 articles analysed, and emerge as one of the main reasons for the
perceived toxicity and misuse of calling out.

In this context, ‘performance’ indicates the act of using call-outs to present a persona, constructed
to appear authentically invested in social change. This understanding of performance, as a form of
morality that was consciously constructed and shared with an audience, carries with it notions of
deceit. Marwick and boyd (2011) describe how Twitter users, conscious of the expectations of
authenticity placed upon them by an imagined or real audience, build an identity performance
aiming to strike a balance between “the desire to maintain positive impressions with the need to
seem true or authentic to others” (p.124). Thus, the concept of authenticity emerges as the opposite
of performance. The narrative is that while some call out because they are truly invested in social
change, others only do so to project an image of themselves as socially conscious. While it is true
that the authenticity-performance dichotomy loses meaning when we consider that both are
constructed through discourse, and are highly dependent on context, the distinction remains central
within the data, and is keenly felt by those involved in the call-out controversy: “performative
practices […] can easily become separated from the values which underpinned their creation”
(Ashley).

The idea of performance presupposes an audience, bringing with it images of theatres, applause and
entertainment. Throughout the data, the action of calling out is often negatively described as
creating a spectacle: some authors describe those who call-out as theatre performers, “like they’re
on stage drinking in applause as the audience throws roses at their feet” (Lecia). Another claims that

29
social justice movements “need to get back to trying to help others instead of looking for an
audience and putting on a spectacle” (Ahmad). The extent to which the presence of an audience to
the call-out is perceived to create toxicity is evidenced by the widely praised proposal of ‘calling in’
as an alternative to calling out. Calling in means “speaking privately with an individual who has done
something wrong, in order to address the behaviour without making a spectacle of the address
itself” (Ahmad). The idea is that the instinct to appeal to an audience, constituted by the network of
social media users, generates a loss of authenticity and of honest motives. Calling in, done through
private messaging or in person, removes the public and thus the toxicity: calling in is “a withdrawal
from a sensationalist audience. In these terms I think it can be healthier, depending on who is
involved, and what the problem is” (El-Zayaty).

However, not everyone believes in calling in as a realistic alternative to calling out. The public and
‘performative’ aspect of call-out culture is recognised as powerful: “discussing things privately with
people they disagree with isn’t flashy. Trashing people publicly can provide a thrill and a feeling of
power that might be difficult to give up” (Riley H). The power of the mob that calling out harnesses is
presented both as the core of the practice’s ‘unhealthiness’ and its strength. Thus, calling in is
criticised as missing the point of the original point of call-out culture. In situations in which a
marginalised individual is being harassed, contacting the harasser is potentially dangerous and
counterproductive: “call ins will never work for the most vulnerable people” (Shackelford). It is
precisely in the public aspect of calling out that its power resides. Call-outs, especially when enacted
by vulnerable and marginalised individuals, rely on the collective power of the audience of social
media users to change the power dynamic from one that is unfavourable to one tipped in their
favour. The power of the audience ensures that the criticism will have consequences; if the criticism
is done privately, that power is stripped away.

Performing what? Issues of solidarity and race

These mentions of performance beg the question: performing what, to whom and for what
purpose? The articles provide some possible responses. Showing one’s knowledge of social justice
terminology, superior politics and morals is indicated as a motivator for calling out, a practice
through which users construct their image: “people can demonstrate their wit or how pure their
politics are” (Shackelford). However, most commonly and most strongly, it is argued that, through
call-outs, it is ‘allyship’ that individuals wish to demonstrate. In fact, the term ‘ally’ and its derivatives
appear on 13 different occasions throughout data which discusses performance as a motivation for
calling out. The term ‘allyship’, in this context, indicates solidarity with marginalized communities; in

30
particular, within the struggle for racial equality, “allyship refers to White people working to end the
system that oppresses people of color” (Patel, 2011).

Performance of allyship as a motivation for calling out is felt as particularly deceitful, transforming
calling out into a tool to gain popularity and form a personal brand as a microcelebrity activist
(Tufekci, 2013), rather than to help social progress. When the motivation for calling out is proving
one’s image as a supporter of marginalised communities, then it becomes performative: “it can cross
the line into performing activism when it’s more about you proving your allyship than about the
group you’re trying to support” (Boyer). The discussion of allyship performance is collocated within a
wider discussion on race and privilege in activism. In fact, it is privileged, white activists and social
media users who are perceived to call out as performance: “The "problem" with "callout culture" is
the same as the problem with a lot of things on the left. Vvhyte [white] people latched onto it, co-
opted it, and weaponized and corrupted it by taking it from productive to performative [....], just a
bunch of performative "look how good an ally I am" bullshit” (MerriCatherine). This narrative of a
self-serving activist, motivated not by morals but by personal gain, connects to the literature on
‘slacktivism’, in which online activist practiced are described as both pointless and ‘phony’ (Morozov,
2009; Sherer, 2015).

Instances of calling out motivated by a desire to prove oneself as an ally to marginalised

communities are misguided and can have negative consequences. One way in which this occurs is
“violent solidarity”. This term indicates the practice of sharing material on social media that is
violent and oppressive, in order to call it out. This is done with the intention of displaying solidarity
and constructing an image of oneself as a socially conscious, supportive actor. Violent solidarity is
enabled by the affordances of social media like Twitter, that allow users to share any post to their
followers with a comment, making it simple to spread any content (boyd, Golder and Lotan, 2009).
The result is that the unsettling material is shared, potentially exposing more to its violence;
moreover, the original message is amplified, even if it is accompanied by criticism. The motivation
behind this form of violent solidarity is identified in the positive gain that one can derive from
performing allyship. In fact, the performance can result in “kudos, likes, faves, shares and even
career opportunities” (Rodriguez). In order to fully explain the mechanism whereby call-outs as a
performance generate profit, it is necessary to collocate the practice within the framework of the
attention economy.

Call-outs as entertainment: competing for attention

31
As part of the discourse which describes call-out culture as ‘performative’ throughout the data, the
practice is often compared to a sport or other form of entertainment. It is described as a “something
of a gladiator sport” (Kirk), which encourages “a sense of entertainment and enjoyment in criticizing
others’ behavior” (Goodala). As something entertaining occurring in a digital space, call-outs
generate “affective currencies” in the shape of likes, retweets and other metrics (Nakamura, 2015).
In particular, if the call-out is viral, i.e. if it generates a great deal of measurable reaction, it can lead
to concrete forms of profit: “capitalism rewards the worst kind of callouts. If you are the first to
make a post go viral, read all over the Internet and discussed on blogs and news channels, you are
more likely to gain access to lucrative speaking gigs and writing assignments” (Stryker).

This value-generating potential of call-outs resides in the way in which they create attention. In the
digital economy, as more and more information is produced and shared, attention becomes
increasingly scarce (Goldhaber, 1997). Thus, the digital economy becomes an attention economy, a
system “that revolves primarily around paying, receiving and seeking [...] the attention of other
human beings” (Goldhaber, 2006). The way calling out is practiced is sustained and shaped by this
system. As recognised in the data, call outs generate quantifiable measures of the attention
(Marazzi, 2008). On the “attentional assemblages of digital media” (Terranova, 2012, p.3), likes and
other reactions constitute automated measures of attention received, leading to a “competition for
eyeballs and clickthroughs” (Crogan and Kinsley, 2012, p.1). The existence of a competition for
attention means that social media posts, including call-outs, are likely to be designed to elicit as
much interest as possible, measured through clicks and reactions. It is within this competition that
issues such as misinformation, virality and performance are collocated. If the goal of a call-out is to
gather as much attention as possible, then it pays off to ensure that its content will have as strong
and extreme an impact as possible, without much regard for accuracy or examining one’s
motivations.

Terranova (2012), after Stiegler (2010, p. 18), conceptualises attention as not just as an individual
capacity, but also as a “psychic and social capacity”. In fact, when individuals participate in the
“attentional assemblages” constituted by platforms, they perform actions such as reading, liking,
and sharing. In so doing, they are cooperating and co-producing the social. Behaviour is not rational,
but often mimetic and “contagious” (p. 9). Through the principle of imitation, entire online
communities can pay attention to an issue, leading to the viral status achieved by some call-outs, or
forget it entirely. Downs

32
(1972) describes this as the “Issue-attention cycle”: no issue, regardless of how crucial it is for public
life, remains relevant to the public for very long. This pattern of attention and information
consumption, characterised by brief but intense spikes, has been found to apply to the internet in
particular. Leskovec, Backstrom and Kleinberg (2009) found that the diffusion of topics, ideas and
memes online follows a “heartbeat” pattern, characterised by peaks of attention.

The framework of the attention economy can aid in explaining the narrative according to which
calling out used to have positive consequences, now lost in favour of misusing it for performance:
“call-out culture comes from an inherently good place – the notion that we should not let
discriminatory comments go by unnoticed [...]. This is not necessarily the practice we see today,
however” (Murray); the sense is that now “people use calling-out as a performance [...], an
appropriated version” (Riley H.).

Call-out culture began “as a tool for Black femmes to respond to endless abuse in hostile online
spaces.” (Burns). As Nakamura (2015) remarks, those women of colour were performing unpaid
labour, their only recognition coming in the form of affective currencies such as likes and followers.
Competition for such affective currencies is intense within the “attentional assemblages” of social
media. Therefore, when a communicative strategy such as calling out reveals itself to be successful
in garnering attention, it is unlikely to go unnoticed and unexploited by actors within the attention
economy.

Within the competition of the attention economy, toxicity-generating conflict based in race and
gender arises: the attention-garnering power of calling out is fought over by different identity
groups. The motives of those who call-out are put into question. As attention can highly benefit an
individual, some call-outs emerge which, while discussing issues of identity, politics and social
justice, are perceived as ultimately neither a form of self-defense nor a way to improve discourse,
but rather are seen as exploiting the traction of such topics to generate attention and build a
personal brand. These are the call-outs defined as a ‘performance’, and ‘misused’. Moreover, in an
effort to ensure the success of the call-out, inaccurate, unclear or partial evidence is shared, leading
to viral misinformation and further perceived toxicity. However, all call-outs, whether based on truth
and genuine desire for change and including those classifiable as activism, depend on the attention
economy to succeed: attention is “the scarce and highly contested currency upon which new modes
of digital activism or civic participation depend” (McCosker, 2015, p.1). Therefore, there is no clear
way to immediately identify performative, false or self-serving call-outs, leading to the call-out

33
culture controversy.

4.3. Case study: #LICENZIA_LUCA_MORISI_

One call-out ‘event’ was identified as a case for analysis, and data collected in the form of Tweets.
The aim of this section is to describe how a call-out can play out, and how the themes identified in
the previous sections emerge in a specific instance of calling out, focusing on issues of attention,
digital evidence and activism.

Image 3. Line graph showing the number of tweets tagged #licenzia_LUCA_MORISI published between 22nd and 25th April.

On April 21st, the Italian deputy prime minister’s social media manager, Luca Morisi,
shared a picture of the minister holding an assault rifle on Facebook, accompanied by an
inflammatory message. In the following hours, a call-out of the action and actors involved began,
characterised by the hashtag #licenzia_LUCA_MORISI_. This call-out represents an attempt by a
community of social media, and specifically Twitter, users to harness the power of the smart mob,
and employ it to enact change.

As shown in Image 3, the number of tweets marked with this hashtag, while beginning to increase in
the evening of April 21, spiked significantly on April 22nd, reaching over 18000 tweets published
throughout the day. Over the next two days, the number of posts decreased significantly, nearing 0
on April 25th. The pattern, which features one significant spike of attention followed by a steep
descent, matches Downe’s model of the “issue-attention cycle” and the findings of Leskovec,
Backstrom and Kleinberg (2009) regarding the way information is consumed online: attention on one
issue will spike and then be quickly abandoned.

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The hashtag #facciamorete (#makeanetwork) occurred 10853 times in tweets tagged
#Licenzia_LUCA_MORISI_. The hashtag started on Twitter, on December 13th 2018, with the explicit
goal of promoting “anti-fascist ideals” and “respect for democratic institutions” (Dominioni, 2019).
The founder of the hashtag is also the contributor of 639 tweets to the call-out hashtag
#licenzia_LUCA_MORISI_. On April 22, together with the founder of #facciamorete, just other three
‘top tweeters’ contributed 2003 of the total tweets written. All three are frequent users and
supporters of the #facciamorete movement (table 2). Therefore, while many more actors
participated in the call-out, with a significant number tweeting just once, a small group of actors
constituted the main contributors to the call-out action, showing that the #licenzia_LUCA_MORISI_
call-out, while focusing on the actions of a single individual, is collocated within a larger digital
activist movement which organises around a related hashtag, #facciamorete, in an attempt to
employ the power of the community to enact change.

Top tweeters N of tweets Description

Does not identify as an activist, but active participant in political

1 MarcVitale4 780 hashtags, such as #facciamorete

Self-describes as a political activist, an “anti fascist” and

“defender of democracy”. Created an hashtag to organise
2 MPSkino 639 around, #facciamorete

Does not identify as an activist, but active participant in political

3 LGmarangon 353 hashtags, such as #facciamorete

Does not identify as an activist, but active participant in political

4 LilianaArmato 231 hashtags, such as #facciamorete
Table 2. Top tweeters in #licenzia_LUCA_MORISI_

Screenshots of Luca Morisi’s original Facebook post, which included the picture of the minister and
the caption, constitutes the piece of digital evidence at the core of the call-out. The image, with and
without the caption, was reproduced and shared numerous times, accompanying many of the
tweets in the data. The image was proposed as the motivation for the call-out and criticism aimed at
the minister, social media manager and the political movement they represent. The importance of
this image for sparking criticism underlines the centrality of collecting and sharing digital evidence to
many call-out cases and call-out culture in general.

35
Image 4. Screenshot of tweet including the picture depicting the deputy prime minister.

This case also provides a chance to reflect on the way the power of call-out culture is shaped by and
shapes the attention economy which governs social media platforms. The #licenzia_LUCA_MORISI
movement was highlighted as a ‘trending topic’ on Twitter throughout Italy, and took up a significant
part of public discourse (i.e. attention). Noticing this, some commentators have indicated this case
as one that was purposefully created to divert the attention of public discourse from one issue to
another, exploiting the issue-attention cycle (Downe, 1974). Journalist Gianmichele Laino wrote an
article following the peak of the call-out action, suggesting that the post had been shared with the
intention of distracting from the investigation of one of deputy prime minister Salvini’s party
members for corruption (2019). The same was argued by many other political commentators
(Magnani, 2019; Fabi, 2019; Rubino, 2019). The call-out case would therefore have been engineered
not only to give further space to Salvini in public discourse, but also to make problems and criticism
to his party member less visible. Calling out, in this instance, emerges as a tool employed to compete
successfully in the attention economy, relying on the power of ‘smart mobs’, with the goal of
increasing visibility and manipulating the flow of public discourse in a way that suits a specific public
figure.

36
5. Conclusion

The first part of the analysis focused on answering the research question: ‘what stances make up the
controversy surrounding call-out culture?’. Results showed that the most common cultural narrative
surrounding call-out culture presents it as a powerful but counterproductive tool: often excessively
punitive towards the individual criticised, and ultimately ‘toxic’ and misused. A consistent and vocal
minority rejects this, constructing a counternarrative: calling out is presented as a legitimate practice
that enables racial, gender and sexual minorities to intervene in online discourse and defend
themselves from harassment. Through this counternarrative, marginalised communities revendicate
the right to determine when calling out is appropriate. Analysis of these contrasting stances brings a
crucial insight into call-out culture: the controversy is in fact a struggle, based in identity, for the
legitimation of the practice and control over the cultural narrative of its use and power.

In the second chapter of the analysis, this overarching conflict for cultural legitimacy is instantiated
in specific issues generated by the affordances of platforms and technology that are relevant to and
complicate the call-out practice. The section aimed to answer the second research question: ‘why
are call-outs considered toxic and misused?’. Firstly, the roles of evidence, truth and of
misinformation within call-out culture are discussed as a location for further toxicity-generating
struggle. Different identity groups continue to produce contrasting narrative surrounding each
affordance: the practice of collecting digital evidence is variably described as necessary or punitive;
virality is either presented as desirable or uncontrollable and potentially false; the recording of daily
life enabled by ubiquitous phone cameras is considered either dangerous peer surveillance or a way
to empower marginalised communities, bringing attention to the daily oppression they experience.
The result is a confusing conversation: the interactions between call-out culture and the affordances
of technology are not considered fully culturally legitimate, but controversial, generating a sense of
insecurity and potential harm, brought together in the discourse of toxicity.

The conflict for cultural control over calling out is then understood within the framework of the
attention economy, which structures the dynamics of all online platforms (Terranova, 2012; Crogan
and Kinsley, 2012). As all call-outs must receive attention to have impact, it is argued that the
presence of an audience becomes a motivator for the misuse of calling out: no longer employed as a
tool of self defense, education or protest (Nakamura, 2015; Jane, 2016), but a way to build one’s
online persona as a socially conscious activist (Tufekci, 2013) or to manipulate public discourse. This
generates the perception that the practice is misused and creates further conflict, as the narrative

37
splits call-outs and those who participate in them into ‘authentic’ and ‘performative’.

Limitations and future study

This dissertation aimed to give an overview of the highly complex and under-researched social
phenomenon of calling out. Many aspects of the practice, including specific instances of call-out and
its different iterations in specific communities and contexts remain understudied. The present work
is somewhat limited as it focuses mainly on the narratives generally surrounding call-out culture
present in online discourse, rather than interrogating individuals and texts directly involved in a
range of call-out cases. The research has shown that a debate exists surrounding the practice, but
much more work could be done into how calling out interacts with the rules and social norms of
specific platforms, and across digital and national cultures. By focusing on specific instances and
employing in-depth qualitative analysis, individual’s experiences with the practice could be
investigated, thus moving beyond an understanding based only in cultural identity to a more in-
depth view at the motivations and consequences of call-out culture. Such work would contribute to
our knowledge of calling out as a practice, and to the field of study of identity-based digital activism
and vigilantism.

6. References

6.1. Articles referenced in the analysis

Abidin, C. (2018, January). Public shaming, Peer surveillance, and the Profitability of
internet drama. Retrieved from
https://wishcrys.com/2018/09/23/public-shaming-peer-surveillance-and-the
-profitability-of-internet-drama/.
Ahmad, A. (2015, March 2). A note on call-out culture. Retrieved from
https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/a-note-on-call-out-culture.
Arsua, K. (2018, September 16). Has the call-out culture on social media become too toxic?.
Retrieved from
https://www.wheninmanila.com/has-the-call-out-culture-on-social-media
-become-too-toxic/.

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Ashley, F. (2018, March 5). Navigating Call out culture: Queer culture has evolved, not lost
its edge. Retrieved from
https://medium.com/@florence.ashley/queer-culture-didnt-lose-its-edge-
it-just-changed-52883ed4189d.
Boyer, A. (2017, October 10). 10 signs that callout you’re about to reblog may be abusive.
Retrieved from
https://medium.com/@amytranscend/theres-been-a-lot-of-important-talk-lately-
about-how-callout-culture-can-actually-be-used-to-harm-543b13ce5add.
Burns, K. (2017, September 18), How call-out culture snowballed and why it’s here to stay.
Retrieved from
https://everydayfeminism.com/2017/09/call-culture-snowballed-stay/.
Cross, K. (2015, n.d.). So you’ve been publicly scapegoated: Why we must speak out on call-out
culture. Retrieved from
http://feministing.com/2015/04/16/so-youve-been-publicly-scapegoated
-why-we-must-speak-out-on-call-out-culture/#comment-1973526360.
Duca, L. (2018, February 16). 6 Feminists take on call-out culture. Retrieved from
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/6-feminists-take-on-call-out-culture.
El-Zayaty, A. (2017, November 12). Calling out call-out culture: The oppression within social
media. Retrieved from
http://qahwetmasr.com/article/Calling-Out_Call-Out_Culture:_The_
Oppression_Within_Social_Media/
Ellis, E.G. (2018, December 12). The case for viral ‘callout’ culture. Retrieved from
https://www.wired.com/story/viral-call-out-culture/.
Fairbanks, A. (2017, May 31). It isn’t call-out culture that is toxic. Retrieved from
https://medium.com/@ashleyfairbanks/it-isnt-call-out-culture-that-is-toxic
-58607efcd7d0
Goodala, A. (2018, October 23). The rise of call-out culture. Retrieved from
https://virginiapolitics.org/editorials/2018/10/23/the-rise-of-call-out-culture.
Gross K. and Wojcik M., (2019, March 15). Call-out culture: Internet phenomenon threatens
truth. Retrieved from
https://dgnomega.org/8217/opinions/call-out-culture-internet-phenomenon
-threatens-truth/.

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Haider, Z. (2017, October 25). Call-out culture: doing more harm than good?. Retrieved from
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/perspective/call-out-culture-doing-more
-harm-good-1481158.
Herzog, K. (2018, January 23). Call-out culture is a toxic garbage dumpster fire of trash.
Retrieved from
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/01/23/25741141/call-out-culture-is
-a-toxic-garbage-dumpster-fire-of-trash.
Kirk, D.A. (2018, May 12). Calling out call-out culture. Retrieved from
https://medium.com/s/story/calling-out-call-out-culture-dresses-mental
-health-and-the-destructive-nature-of-online-shaming-1eaac4e164a.
Lecia, M. (2018, October 19). Allies, have you been called out and worked through the harm you’ve
caused?. Retrieved from
https://medium.com/@LeciaMichelle/allies-have-you-been-called-out
-and-worked-through-harm-youve-caused-4d41f2640af4.
Lyric, (2018, July 20). Calling out the positive force of ‘call-out’ culture. Retrieved from
https://voxatl.org/calling-positive-force-call-culture/.
Melo, D. (2019, February 4). What’s missing from call-out culture: The opportunity to
change. Retrieved from
https://areomagazine.com/2019/02/04/whats-missing-from-call-out
-culture-the-opportunity-to-change/.
Merri C. (2017, March 29). On call out culture. Retrieved from
https://medium.com/@merricatherine/on-call-out-culture-2735d2e45785.
Murray, A. (2017, October 16). Call-out culture is not effective at challenging oppression.
Retrieved from http://www.studentnewspaper.org/call-out-culture-is-
not-effective-at-challenging-oppression/.
Paresky, P. B. (2018, December 9). Has callout culture finally gone too far?. Retrieved from
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/happiness-and-the-pursuit
-leadership/201812/has-callout-culture-finally-gone-too-far.
Riley, H. (2017, May 2). Call out culture isn’t toxic. You are. Retrieved from
https://medium.com/@dtwps/call-out-culture-isnt-toxic-you-are-6e12b5410cd6.
Rodriguez, P. H. (2015, June 8). Caitlyn Jenner, Social media and violent ‘Solidarity’.
Retrieved from
https://www.bgdblog.org/2015/06/caitlyn-jenner-social-media-and-violent
-solidarity-calling-out-abusive-material-sharing-it/.

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