#TheTriggering

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Part of a series on Social Justice Blogging. [View Related Entries]

Overview

#TheTriggering is a hashtag-based activist campaign launched by Canadian conservative political commentator Lauren Southern to challenge the contemporary values of political correctness and the radical faction within the social justice movement by sharing provocative message that would be deemed as triggers for the aforementioned group in defense of free speech on March 9th and 10th, 2016.

Background

On September 18th, 2015, Southern posted a tweet calling for the creation of a day named "The Triggering," during which participants would post "offensive" statements on social media in defense of free speech (shown below, left).^[1] Over the next six months, the tweet garnered upwards of 980 likes and 730 retweets. The following day, Southern announced that the hashtag campaign "#TheTriggering" would take place on March 9th, 2016 (shown below, right).^[2]

Notable Developments

On March 7th, 2016, the Internet culture blog Age of Shitlords^[3] published an article about the upcoming social media campaign. The following day, a post promoting the hashtag was submitted to the International Skeptics Forum,^[8] which called for readers to stand up for free speech "like Socrates would." On March 9th, Twitter users began posting the hashtag "#TheTriggering"^[5] along with various statements criticizing political correctness (shown below).

That morning, Twitter user @MartinDaubney posted a screenshot of Twitter search, accusing the platform of "suppressing" the hashtag (shown below). Meanwhile, Redditor pl0x submitted a post about the campaign to the /r/KotakuInAction^[7] subreddit.

During much of the day, the #TheTriggering remained a worldwide trending topic on Twitter. Meanwhile, YouTuber Fem Fighter uploaded a satirical response video titled "#TheTriggering is Triggering," in which she feigns outrage over the hashtag campaign (shown below). In the coming days, several news site published articles about the hashtag campaign, including Infowars,^[6] The Mary Sue^[4] and WeHuntedTheMammoth.^[9]