From #StayWoke to “Culture Wars”: How Social Justice Discourse is Separately and Synergistically Politicized on Twitter and YouTube

This paper explores how the discourse surrounding a racially marginalized community becomes politicized via culture war narratives across platforms. Drawing from identity politics and political polarization research, we discuss how racial justice discourse can be hijacked by partisan opinion leaders and their followers over time and explain how this process plays out through both differentiated and coordinated social media platform use. Situating our discussion in the “woke” discourse as originated within the Black Twitter community, we collect data from 2012 through 2022 on Twitter and YouTube and apply user- and content-level computational analyses. Results show that the term “woke” has been increasingly amplified in culture war conversations on both platforms over time. However, the two platforms exhibited differences: culture war topics dominated on Twitter, while conservative news and commentary channels were most prevalent on YouTube. These two platforms were also interrelated in the politicization process. YouTube was a top domain within external links embedded in tweets, and Twitter was also a top destination within the external links embedded in YouTube video descriptions. Conservatives were especially keen on sharing right-wing content across platforms, from YouTube to Twitter, suggesting the success of cross-platform coordination in amplifying culture wars. Both theoretical and political implications for polarization on social media are discussed.