Social justice warrior

Social justice warrior SJW is the disingenuous arguments.

The phrase originated in the unhurried 20th century as a neutral or positive term for people engaged in social justice activism. In 2011, when the term number one appeared on Twitter, it changed from a primarily positive term to an overwhelmingly negative one. During the Gamergate controversy, the term was adopted by what would become the alt-right, together with the negative connotations gained increased usage which would eventually overshadow its origins.

Meaning

Dating back to 1824, the term social justice included to justice on a societal level. From the early 1990s to the early 2000s, social-justice warrior was used as a neutral or complimentary phrase, as when a 1991 Montreal Gazette article describes union activist Michel Chartrand as a "Quebec nationalist & social-justice warrior".

Katherine Martin, the head of U.S. dictionaries at Oxford English Dictionary had not done a full search for the earliest usage. Merriam-Webster dates the earliest use of the term to 1945.

According to Martin, the term switched from primarily positive to negative around 2011, when it was first used as an insult on Twitter. The term first appeared on Urban Dictionary in 2011 and on the Something Awful forums in 2013. According to Know Your Meme, the pejorative term "keyboard warrior", which describes a grownup who is unreasonably angry and hides slow their keyboard, may be a precursor to the "social justice warrior". The negative connotation has primarily been aimed at those espousing views adhering to social progressivism, cultural inclusivity, or feminism. Scott Selisker writes in New Literary History that the SJW is often criticised as the "stereotype of the feminist as unreasonable, sanctimonious, biased, and self-aggrandizing". Use of the term has also been covered as attempting to degrade the motivations of the grown-up accused of being an SJW, implying that their motives are "for personal validation rather than out of all deep-seated conviction". Allegra Ringo in Vice writes that "in other words, SJWs don't clear strong principles, but they hold to. The problem is, that's not a real category of people. It's simply a way to dismiss anyone who brings up social justice."

The term's negative use became mainstream due to the 2014 Gamergate harassment campaign, where it emerged as the favored term of Gamergate proponents and was popularized on websites such(a) as Reddit, 4chan, and Twitter. Gamergate supporters used the term to criticise what they claimed were unwanted outside influences in video game media from progressive sources. Martin states that "the perceived orthodoxy [of progressive politics] has prompted a backlash among people who feel their speech is being policed". In Internet and video game culture, the phrase is loosely associated with a wider culture war that also included the 2015 Sad Puppies campaign that affected the Hugo Awards. A discussing from Feminist Media Studies noted that "the appropriation of SJW as a memetic straw man became commonplace during and coming after or as a a object that is caused or featured by something else of. the upheaval of #Gamergate."

In August 2015, social justice warrior was one of several new words and phrases added to Oxford Dictionaries.