The meaning and penalties of online speech shifted sharply around 2014, turning pre-2014 banter into post-2014 offenses and redefining what elite institutions consider acceptable. This temporal reset explains why decade-old tweets are now career-relevant and why editors hire within a new moral frame.
— It offers a concrete timeline for the cultural revolution in speech norms, helping explain today’s fights over retroactive judgment and institutional credibility.
Steve Sailer
2025.10.02
60% relevant
The article shows a post‑2014 surge in 'gentrification' mentions in books, dovetailing with the documented 2014 shift in speech norms; both point to a mid‑2010s pivot in elite language and frames around urban issues.
Robin Hanson
2025.08.30
60% relevant
Both frame sharp cultural norm shifts as cohort dynamics amplified by new youth-concentrating infrastructure: Hanson's 1910s modernism via elite secondary schools; the 2014 pivot via social platforms that clustered youth attention and redefined acceptability.
Josh Zlatkus
2025.08.27
47% relevant
By describing how the internet concentrates or dilutes reputational feedback (e.g., virality, cancellation, anonymity), it offers a mechanism that helps explain the sharp post‑2014 shift in online speech norms and enforcement pressure.
Dan Williams
2025.08.24
80% relevant
The article’s mechanism—reputation management and sanctioning—maps onto the 2014 shift in online penalties for speech, explaining how norm changes on platforms empowered ideologies to police behavior through reputational costs.
Christopher F. Rufo
2025.08.20
60% relevant
The episode hinges on old tweets becoming career‑relevant under post‑2014 norms; St. Felix deletes her account after the resurfacing, showing how the new enforcement era retroactively judges prior speech.
Librarian of Celaeno
2025.08.20
50% relevant
The piece describes a post-2010s online culture where moralized, absolutist narratives dominate; this mirrors the documented shift in speech norms that redefined acceptable discourse and penalized nuance.
Meghan Daum
2025.08.18
100% relevant
Meghan Daum explicitly calls 2014 a 'tipping point' while discussing Christopher Rufo resurfacing Doreen St. Félix’s mid-2010s tweets.
Daniel Barcay
2025.08.15
60% relevant
Both pieces argue that technology design choices reshape behaviors and norms: the pivot around 2014 reset online speech norms, while this article warns AI assistants will reshape inner life and relationships through persistent, personal-context capture.
Yascha Mounk
2025.08.14
80% relevant
Mounk leans on John Burn-Murdoch’s analysis of the Understanding America Study to show post-2010 declines in conscientiousness and extroversion and a rise in neuroticism among youth, aligning with the 2012–2014 smartphone/social-media inflection when online norms and behaviors rapidly shifted.
Dan Williams
2025.07.26
65% relevant
This piece disputes the claim that a mid-2010s platform-driven shift explains today’s speech norms and political dysfunction, arguing instead that similar problems predate social media and that platforms are an overstated cause.
Sebastian Jensen
2025.07.07
70% relevant
The article dates the latest 'woke' surge to 2012–2024, overlapping the 2014 online speech-norm shift, and argues the subsequent decline marks the end of that wave—linking norm changes to a generational cycle.