why white people fled the "ghetto" of myspace

What's something that is considered classy if you are white but trashy if you are a person

of colour? To name a few—speaking

multiple languages, having an accent, braided hair… having a Myspace account?

This viral TikTok trend tells a narrative of BIPOC and their experiences with the racial divide on seemingly homogenous social constructs. Something as nonpartisan as the ability to speak multiple languages should not be segregated by class or race. Yet these content creators contend that immigrants are considered lesser, whereas their white counterparts are admired for their bilingualism. Kate Wagner's article "404 Page Not Found" discusses this (baseless) racial divide paralleled in the discourse between Myspace and Facebook.

Wagner highlights danah boyd's essay on the class divisions "inherent" to Myspace and Facebook. boyd says that the reason for the Myspace/Facebook divide was

"class aspiration, often along racial lines, a phenomenon boyd compares to the urban white flight of the mid-twentieth century. (In this analogy, Facebook plays the role of picket-fence suburbia)."

Further, the downfall of Myspace was that parents who were spurred by moral panics (often racialized) surrounding inappropriate social media use on the anarchic Myspace, began to view Facebook as a cleaner alternative for their children.

How has the classist (and obviously racist) divide created something as meaningless as the harmful discourse surrounding Facebook and Myspace? These two social media platforms serve the same purpose as online social media and social networking services. Yet somehow, one has been designated as a "ghetto" and the other "the place where the 'honors kids' got together and discussed how they were procrastinating over their next AP English essay."

Where does that leave Myspace today after being abandoned by the public? Kate Wagner depicts that Myspace's user base was mainly comprised of tweens and teens—young people eager to become adults. As a result, most of their user base was erased as we moved into the 21st century. One staggering parallel that strikes me is the production and retention of Indigenous knowledge production in the academic sphere.

I see striking similarities in Indigenous decolonization theory's recognition, retention, and teaching. Recounts of Indigenous history through art, poetry, and stories are usually erased and revalued. Academic scholarship frequently denies the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples by using academic poise to exclude means of knowledge production that are not academic writing. Similarly, Myspace was a platform where users possessed far greater agency in terms of stylistic direction. By contrast, Facebook was aesthetically regulated, with fewer user customization capabilities. The idea that creative expression and knowledge production must be regulated (or contained in a white box) to be recognized is the fundamental definition of censorship. What's the consequence? The perspectives, knowledge, and history of BIPOC, women, queer, lower-class individuals are erased. Seemingly, it never existed. If no one wrote about it, it can't have ever existed, right?

In navigating these trivial binaries, why is there always an unequal power relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed? I argue that everything, even the discourse between Myspace and Facebook, has an oppressor-oppressed binary. Audre Lorde's "Age, Race, Class, Sex: Women Redefining Difference," says that "in a society where good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systemized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior."

Maybe, you think this discourse is untimely, perhaps relevant fifty years ago, and not now. I argue that this binary has always existed and will likely never fully dissipate. Further, I argue that the oppressor-oppressed binary manifests everywhere; it is just a matter of which is more evident than others.