Responding to highly mediated tragedies with insensitive pranking and irony had been a staple of online trolling cultures for many years before, but Harambe was the first case attracting such large numbers of people online wanting to get in on the in-joke. It went viral too, because it hit at a time when a particular style of humorless, self-righteous, right-on social media sentimentality had already reached such an absurd peak that the once obscure style of ironic cynical mockery also emerged into more mainstream Internet-culture as a counterforce.

the de-anonymized social media platforms, where most young people now develop their political ideas for the first time, became a panopticon, in which the mny lived in fear of observation from the eagle eye of an offended organizer of public shaming