Keri Smith, a former hardcore SJW activist, has documented how she and others daily targeted people through Wikipedia edits for preparing a cancel. It's quite fascinating the extend of organization and process they used.
For instance, they would not directly edit the target's page, but start working 2 links removed from it, compromise the "friend of a friend of a friend", and then work towards the actual target and finally try to cancel the target through "association with " accusations.
Skimming this: https://www.kerismith.net/
and seeing some of the people she proudly mentions - it seems like she's just switched cults.
Nah she's just going where the money is. Look at how that page is all about telling her core market what they want to hear, and that she's happy to accept their money for a speaking engagement.
It reminds me a bit of campus preachers. They would go to great lengths to describe just how fallen they were before they found Jesus. By inflating how fallen they were, it made for a more dramatic, and to some people, more affirming message of the power of the Gospel. I don't doubt the people felt transformed, but they were motivated my narrative purpose as much as by factual history.
What is SJW? Please avoid using unclear acronyms.
Social Justice Warrior. The acronym has been around for a long time.
That doesn’t mean what everyone is familiar with it. For example I’ve been around since internet slang first developed a life of its own. And yet I wasn’t immediately familiar with SJW either.
By the time you commented you could have at least searched for the acronym or asked AI.
I wasn’t the one who asked.
But even if I were, you’re not accounting for the cumulative benefit saving others from having to research the same acronym.
Let’s get real, they can search. HN doesn’t have a repo of acronyms and this isn’t a technical document where you need to spell out the acronym on first use
In 2025, most online users have learned how to look things up using.. the internet.
Of course, but if everyone does it, it is very inconvenient to read and in some case leaves unnecessary space for misunderstanding. Usually, acronyms are followed by the full wording the first time they are mentioned.
> Usually, acronyms are followed by the full wording the first time they are mentioned.
I'm sure they did at the time this (SJW) acronym got popular. That was maybe 10-15 years ago.
SWJ wasn’t a popular acronym 10 years (let alone 15) ago in the online communities I hung around in. ;)
While this is true, I don't think I have heard/read it once in more than a year, maybe five, actually. It's not used anymore. Pretty much anyone not MAGA has become "leftist", these days.
Usually hijacked and paid by quatar, russia or china. Its always fascinating how fast that im against injustice at home chute leads to "i support a monstrous regime abroad".
The cognitive dissonance can be disturbing. A frightening number of people never grew past a child's logic of "X has problems -> X is the worst thing ever -> if I hate X then that must mean I love the opposite of X" and suddenly they're a trans activist (which is a good thing, to be clear) frothing at the mouth in absolutist terms to defend people who want them dead..
Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can appraise the situation, Israel sucks and has a somewhat higher incidence of committing war crimes than other western countries, but Palestine would suck even worse if you switched their places around, the only thing holding them back from committing much worse atrocities being lack of resources, going by their human rights record and direct statements from their leadership. Israel isn't executing anyone for being gay for example. But out of many factors, one being some left leaning people taking the mental shortcut that the anti-American option is always more intellectual and "owns the conservatives", we've ended up in this nonsense scenario.
It's a term for anyone from a centrist liberal to a Greenpeace activist, with the implication that having left-of-median politics and understanding race and demography as anything other than biological essentialism makes you an utter loon. It is really only used by people who would describe themselves as "anti-woke".
The person he's referencing, specifically, got really pilled by evangelical Christianity and believes that anyone advocating for liberal causes has created a religion out of nebulous cultural values, unmoored from god. She blames the "cult of SJW" for the kind of character assassination she claims to have done, that it was the force of rootless bolshevism that was responsible for her supposedly destroying lives and careers by making up(?) relationships and cultural crimes on whole webs of Wikipedia articles.
Social Justice Warrior but it’s worth noting that actually the acronym has cultural connotations that the words alone do not
The great thing about SJW is it tells you even more about the person using the term that the target. It’s your grandparents’ equivalent of “woke mind virus”.