It’s a Sunday afternoon and I’m absentmindedly scrolling through Instagram stories when an image of two smiling girls pops onto my screen. I squint to read the text: “Happy birthday fatty, can’t wait to be big with you again next year!” The caption, though obviously a joke, is so absurdly offensive I almost laugh. But as I contemplate with unease all of the times I’ve teased my friends or dismissed my own eating choices with similar language, it starts to seem less humorous and more sinister. Like other language trends originating from social media, the words have crossed the threshold of good intentions into decidedly more insidious territory.

The Internet has always been a place where trends change quickly, even when it comes to the treatment of critical topics like self-worth and issues of social rights. While social media platforms of the mid-2010s were densely populated by reposted slogans like “This is what a feminist looks like” or “Every body is a bikini body,” these sentiments have been banished to the same cultural graveyard where the millennial mustache finger tattoo went to die. This retaliation was not unwarranted: the Internetization of movements like feminism and body positivity had led them to become exclusionary and overly policed, defined by an insincerity which removed them entirely from their good-faith origins. However, the swift and utter retaliation against an era defined by values like “wellness” and “self-love” has led to a harmful shift towards intentionally edgy or offensive language which, while written off as ironic and unserious, promotes dangerous attitudes and ideologies.

Despite the Internet’s role in improving widespread awareness and understanding of various social issues, it has also provided a new cesspool in which fringe ideas can gain concerning traction. Whether it’s the safety of anonymity behind a computer screen, or the peer pressure that encourages us to laugh at “jokes” whose humor lies solely in their wild offensiveness, social media has a unique way of encouraging us to be our worst selves online. Take the treatment of women, for example: it was just a few years ago that messages of female empowerment had so fully saturated the Internet that they were inescapable. But the explosion of this new form of feminism became its downfall, as the movement’s arguments became sloganized, corporate, and utterly inauthentic. As online audiences tired of overused Internet feminist rhetoric, they shifted in the polar opposite direction, becoming receptive to increasingly misogynistic ideas. We laughed at the blatantly sexist rhetoric spewed by male podcasters and “anti-feminists,” but allowed it to bleed into mainstream language anyway, losing its irony along the way. In an increasingly divided online sphere, hating women is one of the few topics where Internet users seem to find common understanding.

The shift away from socially progressive ideas online is exemplified in the complete erosion, and twisted resurrection, of the body positivity movement. In the 2010s, users of social media balked at the undisguised, dangerous messaging perpetuated by 1990s-2000s diet culture, forming a new movement to emphasize self-love and acceptance. As it evolved, however, the body positivity movement became tiring for many, forcing unrealistic expectations of confidence that alienated followers from the authenticity they were seeking. Rather than attempting to address the inherent issues within the movement, Internet users abandoned it like rats fleeing a sinking ship, chasing the ever-elusive ideal of exclusivity away from body acceptance and back towards the heavily restrictive food culture they had originally sought to escape. Social media now perpetuates interactions between young people, especially girls, which constitute body shaming and judgemental food policing thinly veiled in irony, like the birthday tribute post that first caught my attention. What began as lighthearted teasing and self-deprecation became tiring, overused, and harmful, blatantly disregarding the real consequences of disordered eating and body image issues, and exposing impressionable young people to dangerous rhetoric under the pretext of humor.

It’s unrealistic to try to convince anyone to completely refrain from making jokes that could be classified as offensive. But as our society becomes more heavily informed by the whims of Internet trends, we have a responsibility to stay aware of the ways we have enabled each other to adopt humorless cruelty. Harmful online language trends have reached issues beyond feminism and diet culture. Much of the content that goes viral on social media relies on horrendously offensive punchlines to elicit shock and amusement for an increasingly desensitized audience, robbing important social issues of the seriousness they deserve to be treated with. We should all make an effort to be more mindful and compassionate with the words we use and the ideas we give attention to, and to learn from the mistakes of our online past rather than using them to fuel more toxic discourse. In the process, maybe we can move towards a more empathetic and empowered society, while maintaining a newfound sense of authenticity that eluded the performatively progressive movements of yesterday.