![Available via license: CC BY-NC 4.0 Content may be subject to copyright. ATLANTIS PRESS Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 491 Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Arts and Humanities (IJCAH 2020) The 'Karen' Fallacy: Debunking Reddit's Stereotype of Facebook Moms Sophie Ariella Tanujaya¹* Reynald Setyawan¹ English Department, Petra Christian University, Indonesia *Corresponding author. Email: a111 80020@john.petra.ac.id 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. Keywords: Facebook Moms, Karen, Reddit, Facebook, Identity 1. INTRODUCTION As more social media options became available, more users began to abandon Facebook, particularly those from the younger age group. According to The Guardian [1], the number of Facebook users from the age of 13 to 17 dropped from 71% to 51% in 2015, following the emergence of Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube (Solon, 2018). However, a particular group of Facebook users shows no decline in number - Facebook moms. The number of Facebook users in the States amounts to 61% of the population, in which 81% of U.S mothers are recorded as active users [2]. Facebook moms' refers to mothers who frequently participate in Facebook group discussions. They choose 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 that Facebook moms are the embodiment of karens. Karen is a pejorative slang for an obnoxious, angry, entitled and often racist middle-aged white woman who uses her privilege to get her way or patronize others [3]. This stereotype originated from a subreddit in Reddit, r/EntitledParents, where karens are often described as anti-vaccination supporters, flat-earth believers, and entitled parents who often ask to speak to the manager [3]. ATLANTIS PRESS It is important to note that there are more male Reddit users than female users. Male Reddit users make up 15% of the total users, in comparison with the 8% female users, with the remaining 77% without an account; thus, unidentifiable. Meanwhile, in terms of age demography, 42% of Reddit users are from the ages of 18 to 29. The second biggest age group, which amounts to approximately 14%, consists of people in their 30s and 40s [4]. Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL. This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license -http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. 581 1.1. Related Work The identity theory proposed by Burke and Stets [6] will be used to analyze the data. Burke and Stets [6] defined identity as the set of meanings that define who one is when one is an occupant of a particular role in society, a member of a particular group, or claims particular characteristics that identify him or her as a unique person. However, we should also consider another noteworthy definition of identity, proposed by Benwell and Stokoe [7] which states that identity is a public phenomenon, or more specifically a performance or construction that is interpreted by other people. This There has been a similar study on Reddit by Emily Merritt [5] in 2012. Merritt [5] used discourse analysis while analyzing four conversations that included the trolling culture on Reddit. The study showed that trolling as an online discursive phenomenon is complex, multifaceted, and serves a purpose in online communication, and it should not be written off as without purpose [5]. ||| The significance of this research is the investigation and identification of identity construction of Facebook moms in two sources: the secondary source (Reddit) and the primary source (Facebook) to prove the involvement of audience design in identity construction. It is interesting to see how different public phenomena which occur in the two platforms create different audience designs, which result in different identity construction. Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 491 2. METHOD Karen is often portrayed as a supporter of anti- vaccination, flat-earth theory, and other conspiracy theories. Karen is often described as abusive, racist, and entitled. This is where the problem with the karen stereotype on Reddit begins. The subreddits often generalize all Facebook moms as karens because there are many karens who are Facebook moms. Hence, the purpose of this study is to dismantle the misguided truth surrounding Facebook moms. To achieve this objective, we analyzed posts from](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/622/553/0b2.png "Someone wrote a whole research paper to debunk the stereotype of facebook Karens | /r/Karen")
Someone wrote a whole research paper to debunk the stereotype of facebook Karens | /r/Karen
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