The ‘Karen’ Fallacy: Debunking Reddit’s Stereotype of Facebook Moms

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201201.101How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Facebook Moms, Karen, Reddit, Facebook, Identity

Abstract

The term “Facebook moms” refers to mothers who frequently participate in Facebook group discussions. They use Facebook as a platform because it allows them to create groups to accommodate their needs including attachments and express their opinions without the word-limit constraint. However, there is a stereotype on Reddit that all Facebook moms are karens. Karens are portrayed as middle-aged women who are often racist, entitled, and abusive. The purpose of this research is to see if there is any truth in the allegation by conducting a qualitative study on Reddit and Facebook posts. The analysis includes 120 posts made by English-speaking mothers in six different Facebook groups and 120 posts on six different subreddits. The identity theories proposed by Burke and Stets as well as and Benwell and Stokoe, along with Bell’s audience-design theory. They are used to analyze the data. The result of this study suggests that Reddit’s stereotype of Facebook moms is mainly false. In fact, facebook moms’ groups are often useful for themselves and others.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Sophie Ariella Tanujaya
AU  - Reynald Setyawan
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/03
TI  - The ‘Karen’ Fallacy: Debunking Reddit’s Stereotype of Facebook Moms
BT  - Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Arts and Humanities (IJCAH 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 581
EP  - 586
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201201.101
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201201.101
ID  - Tanujaya2020
ER  -