As I’ve covered before on Mouthpiece, language has always been a mechanism of power, shaping who is silenced, who is heard, and who must adapt. In my previous article, Linguistic Capital & the Policing of Prestige, I explored how linguistic capital enforces class and professional hierarchies by determining who is granted legitimacy through language, how prestige speech functions as a gatekeeping mechanism in elite spaces, and how institutions regulate and police speech to maintain existing power structures. In Who Controls the Narrative?, I examined status and framing as mechanisms for shaping cultural power: how those in power define legitimacy through language, how narratives are strategically crafted to reinforce social hierarchies, and how control over discourse influences public perception, media representation, and institutional authority. 

Adding to my previous writings, this essay argues that digital spaces serve two primary functions in the evolution of language: (1) introducing new linguistic hierarchies and (2) becoming sites of resistance.

Here, I’m exploring three main questions: (1) How has digital communication transformed linguistic authority?, (2) Can internet language truly disrupt linguistic power, or does it just create new hierarchies?, and (3) How do social movements use digital language, and how do institutions respond? 

To answer these, I’ll weave together three key theoretical anchors: 

• The first is about the idea of “weak ties” that Gretchen McCulloch underlines in her book, Because Internet. She explains that the internet accelerates linguistic change by facilitating more weak tie connections, spreading linguistic innovations faster. 
• The second is going back to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of linguistic capital, which he leverages as a key framework in his book Language and Symbolic Power. By understanding linguistic capital better (which you can read more about in my post Linguistic Capital & the Policing of Prestige), I extend his argument by showing that digital fluency now functions as a kind of prestige dialect, just as WASP aristocratic speech once (and in some spaces, still does) defined legitimacy. 
• I also want to highlight Deborah Cameron’s concept of “verbal hygiene,” (which you can read more about in Linguistic Capital & the Policing of Prestige too), which highlights how institutions regulate language to maintain power. Digital speech may evolve freely, but institutions impose constraints, sanitizing and shaping language to serve their own interests. 

Through these main questions and theoretical anchors, I argue that digital language has reshaped power by accelerating linguistic evolution, establishing new hierarchies of prestige speech, and serving as both a tool for social movements and a mechanism of institutional control. Unlike my previous essays, this one explicity examines how digital spaces shape language itself. Memes, slang, and digital fluency now serve as status markers of in-group belonging, defining cultural and political influence online. While internet discourse enables rapid mobilization and broader participation, it also reinforces new forms of gatekeeping, linguistic appropriation, and corporate co-optation, whether through meme culture, algorithmic curation, or the mainstreaming of marginalized speech. 

This raises a fundamental question: does digital language have the power to challenge existing hierarchies, or does it simply reconstruct them in new forms? 

Digital Activism and the Linguistic Evolution of Protest

Just as the printing press, radio, and television reshaped linguistic authority, the internet accelerated and decentralized language change. This shift is particularly evident in digital activism, where movements compete to control linguistic meaning, framing narratives to define their causes.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s 2010 piece for The New Yorker titled “Small Change,” he quotes Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam who analyzed participants in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964. McAdam found that while all of the participants shared the same moxie, the active participants (as opposed to the ones who dropped out) were likely to have friends going down to Mississippi, too. He explained that high-risk activism, like that of what the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee put Northern whites on to “run Freedom Schools, register black voters, and raise civil-rights awareness in the Deep South,” was therefore a “strong-tie phenomenon.” Strong and weak ties, in particular, are crucial in understanding language change. Strong ties are people you feel close to, spend a lot of time with, and likely share mutual friends with. Weak ties are acquaintances with or without mutual ties. 

Gladwell’s point in his article was that social media isn’t a place for strong ties. McCulloch’s work references this as well. The internet creates “weak ties” that allow linguistic innovations to spread rapidly. James Milroy and Leslie Milroy, linguistics researchers, found that weak ties provide more information than strong ties. More weak ties means more linguistic change. It’s not a matter of which kinds of ties are more important to have, we all have both types in our lives, but “the weak ties introduce the new forms in the first place, while the strong ties spread them once they’re introduced” (McCullouch, 39). But Gladwell also points out an important argument: “Social networks are effective at increasing participation – by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.” 

“Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people are loose.” Here’s where Gladwell’s argument loses me as a participant. He’s saying that there is no such thing as a hierarchy online, that there is a democratization inherent to the spaces. But there is a hierarchy in these networks, there exists the arbiters of truth, the arbiters of cool, the arbiters of prestige. These moral evaluations may come at the delivery of a chorus, but there is an inherent First Follower Principle here, too. Gladwell doesn’t see that there is a hierarchy, albeit nameless, inherent to being online, and that the language being spoken is one that defines and codifies in-groups and out-groups. The decision to “participate” in an online movement is one of social signaling, saying “I, too, believe in this cause,” either because that person is worried of what people will think if they don’t support the cause, or because the cause does, in fact, align with their moral worldview. 

Since I’m not looking to analyze the mechanisms of protest itself, and whether weak-ties or strong-ties make a better movement, but the language behind it and how it changes online, I’ll diverge from Gladwell’s argument to move on to the historical aspect of language. Not looking at how a movement is codified through media, but how the language is decided in structure. In the past, where speeches, newspapers, and TV were the primary methods of dissemination, linguistics change moved slowly. In the 1960s Civil Rights movement, print and broadcast media were the institutions of power, shaping the slogans that the world defined the movement by. But when we look at digital protest language, we see that there is an allowance for real-time linguistic adaptation, changing how movements frame their messages. We watch the shift between “police brutality,” “state violence,” and “abolition” in real-time. The other side of this is that Black Twitter is often a linguistic incubator. Phrases like “stay woke” and “say their names” originated in Black digital spaces before being adopted or co-opted. 

These shifts are a part of a linguistic “register.” Just like traditional dialects, they have insider language that signals belonging. McCulloch writes, “like all cultures, internet culture is referential, baffling to outsiders, relying more on shared history than explicit instruction.” In particular, memes are a linguistic touchstone, an atom of the cultural epoch, that are both unifiers and gatekeepers, reinforcing in-group belonging while creating boundaries that distinguish insiders from outsiders. As internet culture becomes mainstream culture, memes function as a linguistic recruitment tool, inviting participation while requiring cultural and technical fluency. Like slang or typography, memes communicate identity, irony, and social cues, reflecting the evolving and self-referential nature of internet culture. McCulloch again writes, “Making and sharing memes is about policing what’s in and what’s out in internet culture.” 

Let’s look at the linguistic evolution of an online movement like #MeToo. Borrowing from Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles’ book #HashtagActivism, we see that #MeToo started as a movement around personal testimony, when survivors used the phrase to share experiences of sexual harassment and assault. This created a collective narrative that emphasized systemic patterns of abuse. But as the movement grew and gained traction, companies started integrating the rhetoric of the movement into their own corporate speak, specifically leveraging the language within HR policies, to shift focus from public accountability to internal compliance measures like workplace harassment training and zero-tolerance policies. Too, there were high-profile cases, like Hollywood’s response to Harvey Weinstein, that highlighted this linguistic adoption, and therefore linguistic softening, which showed studios and agencies adopting the #MeToo-aligned messaging, but a staunch refusal to change the system that created the abuses and harassment in the first place. The studios’ and agencies’ structural power hierarchies largely remained intact. In the place of meaningful change came settlements and PR campaigns. This evolution reflects a broader pattern in digital activism, where language begins as a grassroots demand for justice, and eventually becomes mainstream and sanitized. To which I also ask, does widespread institutional adoption of activist language strengthen or weaken a movement’s original goals? If we take from George Lakoff’s playbook (read more in Who Controls the Narrative?), the fact that these companies are using the framing of the activists strengthens the work the activists are doing. But the lack of mandated change and continuous pressure often removes the onus from companies going further than just using the language. 

Memes as Digital Linguistic Gatekeeping and Power Negotiation

While digital speech fuels activism, it also creates linguistic gatekeeping mechanisms. Memes and hashtags mobilize supporters but also define who belongs, creating new linguistic hierarchies. Internet slang, and memes in particular, function like a prestige dialect, determining insider status online. McCulloch writes, “Memes can be a linguistic recruitment tool: observers want to be part of the in-group that gets the memes.” Just like regional dialects or social class speech, memes create in-groups and out-groups. While our original perception of the internet is that it democratizes access and creates a level playing field for all, there are many ways in which linguistic hierarchies, and therefore social hierarchies, pervade. 

In this, too, we can look at the cycle of linguistic appropriation, wherein marginalized communities create linguistic innovations, like African American Vernacular English (AAVE), internet slang, and protest memes. These terms and images and phrasings gain popularity in digital spaces and are eventually adopted by mainstream culture. Once co-opted by brands, institutions, or mass media, the terms lose their original significance. “When a word gets sufficiently associated with mainstream culture—especially when picked up by brands—it loses its appeal to insiders,” McCulloch explains. As movements create new linguistic norms, institutions seek to regulate and control digital speech. 

Institutional Co-Optation and the Limits of the Language of Digital Activism

Digital speech is often shaped and constrained by the institutions that control online conversations. Platforms, brands, and newspapers regulate and sanitize language, reinforcing hierarchies even as they adopt the rhetoric of social movements. This process, which I’ve referred to previously in my post Linguistic Capital & the Policing of Prestige, can be linked to Deborah Cameron’s concept of “verbal hygiene,” which can include institutions absorbing progressive language while maintaining structural control. The corporate adoption of activist language often serves as a mere rhetorical shift rather than a substantive one, creating a cycle in which radical ideas are co-opted, and repurposed to align with the interests of power. 

One of the most pervasive mechanisms of institutional linguistic control in digital spaces is algorithmic curation. To connect to McCulloch’s argument, algorithms function as a form of digital “verbal hygiene,” reinforcing dominant linguistic norms and practices, determining which forms of speech gain visibility. Spellcheck, autocomplete, and predictive text are prime examples of this process, subtly enforcing traditional rules of “proper” or “correct” English and filtering out any deviations from the norm. “Tools like spellcheck and autocomplete impose someone’s idea of the rules of English automatically,” McCulloch writes. These tools encode a prescriptive linguistic standard, one that often marginalizes non-dominant dialects, internet vernaculars, and protest language. 

Platforms like X, Instagram, and TikTok further regulate digital speech through content moderation policies and algorithmic filtering. These mechanisms shape discourse by determining which terms and phrases are elevated and which are suppressed. For instance, activists have long made note of words associated with social justice movements, like “Black Lives Matter” or “Palestine,” that are sometimes flagged as sensitive content, while corporate-friendly narratives remain favored by the algorithms. In this way, digital platforms act as arbiters of linguistic legitimacy, controlling the reach and impact of activist language. 

At the same time, algorithms prioritize engagement-driven content, which often rewards sensationalism over nuance or truthfulness. This shifts the nature of activist discourse, favoring virality over sustained, structured arguments. It also prioritizes the concept that humans are more convinced by emotions than they are by data, facts, or a well-thought argument. In this context, social movements must strategically code-switch, adapting their language to align with the platform’s preferences in order to gain traction. The very tools that enable linguistic innovation online also impose boundaries on which types of language can spread. 

Beyond digital platforms, corporations play a key role in co-opting and regulating activist language. As social movements introduce new language, through hashtags, slogans, memes or other viral entities, corporations often appropriate these terms for branding and marketing purposes, a process sometimes referred to as “woke-washing.” Harvard Business Review’s analysis of “Corporate Woke-Washing” highlights how brands integrate activist rhetoric into their messaging without committing to the structural changes those movements demand.

The cycle of linguistic appropriation I wrote about earlier in this piece reflects a broader tension within digital activism: the very mechanisms that allow movements to shape discourse also make them susceptible to co-optation. Although we’re seeing a shift in the other direction, based on the current political landscape, institutions strategically deploy activist language to signal their alignment with the political beliefs of the time, while maintaining existing power structures that don’t threaten their revenue or reputation. 

The Paradox of Digital Linguistic Power

Ultimately, digital spaces reshape linguistic power by accelerating language change, introducing new prestige dialects, and serving as battlegrounds for meaning-making. The internet enables marginalized voices to challenge dominant narratives and mobilize movements, but it also reinforces new hierarchies of linguistic legitimacy. Algorithmic curation, corporate co-optation, and platform moderation reveal the limits of digital speech as a tool for systemic change.

Gretchen McCulloch writes, “Language is humanity’s most spectacular open-source project.” Digital spaces reflect this reality more than ever, where linguistic innovation happens in real time, shaped collectively by millions of users. Unlike traditional linguistic gatekeepers, which include academies, institutions, and elite social circles, the internet allows speech to evolve through decentralized participation. However, while this decentralization and perceived democratization creates opportunities for resistance, it also presents new vulnerabilities. As institutions increasingly absorb activist rhetoric, the challenge for movements becomes not just controlling language, but ensuring that shifts in language translate into material change.

This raises a final question: does the widespread adoption of activist language strengthen or weaken social movements? While linguistic visibility can amplify a movement’s message, it can also lead to dilution and depoliticization. The internet has made language more dynamic, participatory, and accessible, but it also has made it easier for institutions to appropriate and neutralize its radical potential. In the end, digital language is both a site of resistance and a mechanism of control, reshaping power in ways that are still unfolding.