I haven’t watched a single minute of any season of Love Island, but I’ve seen enough tweets and videos to get the gist of how the season went. We don’t like Sincere. Kenzie keeps doing splits (which people keep calling clam slams). Corbin is basically an AI bot.

Anyone who spends a decent amount of time on social media has probably developed the ability to understand the gist of something that exists in the cultural zeitgeist without full understanding or experiencing the context where it’s from. You don’t need to have played Grand Theft Auto to make a “I can’t believe [thing] came out before GTA 6” joke. You don’t need to have watched the entirety of Girls to quote “Oh, let’s make fun of the girl who took a risk and put herself out there creatively” every time someone doesn’t react the way that you want them to. You certainly don’t need to have watched all of The Real Housewives of Atlanta to understand why so many people do not want to see a white refrigerator in their house. 

While it is fun to see moments like that take on a life of their own, I do think that sometimes we should be more careful with what we decide to adapt as part of our everyday internet lexicon (yeah, sorry, I’m going to be that guy). Often, it really is just silly fun, but we have seen too many cases where people have made something go viral without knowing its a dogwhistle for something, or that it has some sort of bigoted origin, and by the time it gets too big to go away quietly, we’ve normalized something in the world that should’ve never been given any attention in the first place. 

A big example I personally fell victim to was in 2023, when Monica Poli went viral for her “Attenzione Pickpocket!” videos, where she would follow people around her city and call them out for pickpocketing. It was obvious people were going to be entertained by these videos on TikTok. Anyone who plans on traveling to Europe is always warned about the pickpockets, so obviously, it seems like a good thing seeing someone calling out these people for stealing from unassuming tourists. Plus, the internet, whether or not they like to admit it, loves a “serving justice in public” moment. She racked up millions of views on her videos and quickly became an internet sensation.

After a while, it was revealed that she was actually a councillor for Italy’s far-right party, which has targeted asylum seekers, the LGBTQ+ community, and immigrants, especially the Roma population in Italy, with hateful rhetoric. Once this news came to light, people started to wrestle with the fact that this woman might not be fighting crime, but instead might be harming people by discriminating against them.

In a profile with the New York Times, Poli stated that she called people out based on just a feeling, meaning that she didn’t even catch some of those people stealing anything. She was singling people out based on harmful stereotypes, and blasting them on social media for her own gain. 

It is, unfortunately, through things like this that allow hateful groups to take power, as evidenced by the rise of far-right movements across the world. When we co-opt the language of hateful groups, we unintentionally legitimize their views and their presence in the world. I know many people might say something along the lines of “Well, I wasn’t using it in a hateful way”, but that still isn’t an excuse to be more well informed about the language you decide to use online.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t be joking on the internet at all. All I’m trying to say is that we should make sure we understand what we’re talking about before we decide to say or use something with full confidence. 

It’s okay to take things seriously sometimes. I promise.