Good Karen, Bad Karen: visual culture and the anti-vaxx mom on Reddit
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores pre-Covid-19 vaccine sentiment through pro-vaccine (pro-vaxx) internet memes with a focus on anti-vaxx mom and Karen figures. We argue that pro-vaxxers on the popular social news aggregate site Reddit employed Karen and other variations on the anti-vaxx mom as a subversion of the mother warrior figure originally meant to be empowering for vaccine sceptics. While anti-vaxx mom and Karen memes were humorous and participatory, they also presented vaccine attitudes in moralistic and reductive terms via the mother valour/blame binary. The study allows us to understand a trajectory of modern vaccine hesitancy and responses to it leading up to Covid-19. Moreover, it explores the emergence of the Karen figure as a manifestation of moral outrage and indicative of broader struggles related to authoritative knowledge.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it