This paper explores what I call the digital bahdala, the colloquial Arabic word for the state or moment of humiliation or ridicule, in the context of what is framed as national collapse. It does so by turning to two sets of YouTubers in Egypt and Lebanon who rely on a steady stream of other users’ TikTok content to produce their own in the aftermath of national revolutions and economic crises. It shows how these YouTubers employ didactic performances of national repair, using not only the affordances but imaginaries of the Internet to juxtapose what is framed as embarrassing with what is framed as moral or respectable. It draws on the literature on respectability politics to show how these performances work to enforce an aspirational social and economic mobility, one which is under threat for postcolonial nations dependent on former colonizing countries and transnational capital regimes for their political and economic futures. By employing textual analysis of three YouTubers’ videos and political economic analysis of the relationship between Arab TikTok and YouTube, I offer that localized practices of respectability become global performances of nationalist identity when they take place on social media platforms, allowing audiences to take part by deciding what is cringey, immoral, or humiliating as a way of repairing threatened national codes. It is the aim of this paper to generate discussion about the intersections between empire and communication theory and offer alternative frameworks for theories of technology and power.

The condition of road infrastructure in New Orleans is recognized among citizens as unacceptably poor. This problem is situated in the context of a long list of problems with the municipal government and city services that have combined to create an atmosphere of distrust and deep frustration. On Instagram, ‘Look At This F*ckin’ Street’ exists to document failing local infrastructure and has nearly 100,000 followers and an active culture of crowdsourced user submissions and regular engagement in comments and reposts. In this paper, I utilize Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to explore all of the relevant discursive modalities seen in the account in order to uncover how they work to challenge and ultimately undermine power. Via an open coding process, I identify three main strategies employed by the anonymous account manager and the participating followers: Shaming, Mocking, and Exposing. Within each of these strategies, I explore the specific techniques observed within these discourses that contribute to the effectiveness of these strategies. I argue that LATFS is an effective and powerful participatory platform for exposing a broad range of systemic problems and their causes, allowing residents to take back the narrative of their city’s infrastructure challenges, diminish and demean the powerful interests responsible, and, ultimately attempt to reclaim the power lost to negligent or even bad-faith municipal authorities in New Orleans.

With the rise of feminist sentiment and the growing awareness of gender equity in China, social media has become an increasingly central space for Chinese feminist expression. However, the complex dynamics of feminist expression in these online spaces—and the role of popular culture in facilitating such discourse—are still to be fully elucidated. Here, focusing on the understudied social media platform Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), we analyze the online discussion sparked by the stand-up comedy acts of Chinese female comedians. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of Douyin videos and related comments, we demonstrate how users employed the platform’s creative features to challenge everyday sexism by echoing or building upon the stand-up comedians’ gags. At the same time, the analysis also uncovers how Douyin is used to insult and push back against these feminist voices. Our findings shed light on the sophisticated role of Douyin as a platform for digital feminist expression, and the ways in which it can amplify both feminist discourse or, conversely, give voice to misogynistic attacks.

Striving to advance our understanding of how social media is used by Sudanese people to engage in politics and continue their resistance against an authoritarian regime, this study examines how online humor facilitated political expression after the December Revolution. Using thematic analysis of user-generated content posted on the Shabab Hilween Facebook page, the main social media outlet of prominent Sudanese youth content creators, this research attempts to highlight how youth-created humorous videos prompted political expression among Sudanese social media users. The findings highlight the significance of proactive memefication and templatization as an act the page owners use to generate community user-generated content. Hundreds of memefied screenshots created or appropriated by users were observed in the comment section to address unfolding political events. This begs the question of what content is essentially popular culture for Sudanese people, especially youth, who, due to years of censorship and propaganda, have no interest in mainstream media? This study discusses the role of Sudanese content creators in addressing this cultural void. The analysis also reveals how Sudanese social media users sought political catharsis and collective relief from the Shabab Hilween page’s humorous videos and the comment section.