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Over the last few days, another round of the all-too-infamous “Discourse” took place on Twitter, this time decrying a fandom-centric reading of the BreadTube label, as left obtusely vague by its very first instant of popular use. For the uninitiated, BreadTube — often used interchangeably with LeftTube — is basically a loose collective of online creators — primarily operating on YouTube — whose political rhetoric aligns with left-wing ideals. It always lingered as a useful framing device when listing out individual creators was otherwise too tedious, but when New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose used it in his blockbuster story “Making of a YouTube Radical”, it was becoming evident that the term’s affect was starting to slowly escape the influence of the very people it made reference to. Whatever definition BreadTube had, it was not the same one it took on after the publication of that piece.
The issue of contention sprawled the entire spectrum of systemic injustices within the media environment-some of it had to do with the way YouTube was built, other facets of it were intrinsically linked to white-favoritism on mainstream media, and a great deal with it had to do with the way media seemed to…
