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Paul Sartre had a lazy eye and a bloated, asymmetrical face, and he attributed many of his philosophical ideas to his lifelong struggle to come to terms with his self–described ugliness. Socrates also used his ugliness as a philosophical touch point, concluding that philosophy can save a person from their outward ugliness. Famous in his own time for his perceived ugliness, Abraham Lincoln was described by a contemporary: “to say that he is ugly is nothing; to add that his figure is grotesque, is to convey no adequate impression.” However, his looks proved to be an asset in his personal and political relationships, as his law partner William Herndon wrote, “He was not a pretty man by any means, nor was he an ugly one; he was a homely man, careless of his looks, both plain–looking and plain–acting. He had no pomp, display, or dignity, so–called. He appeared simple in his carriage and bearing. He was a sad–looking man; his melancholy dripped from him as he walked. His very apparent gloom impressed his friends, and created sympathy for him–one means of his great success.”

Discrimination or prejudice against unattractive people is sometimes referred to as lookism, cacophobia, or aschemophobia, and if it is a result of one’s disfigurement, ableism. Teratophobia is an aversion or fear of people who appear monstrous, have blemishes or are disfigured. When such an aversion is coupled with prejudice or discrimination, it may be viewed as a form of bullying. With the dating world or courtship, judging others purely based on their outward appearance is acknowledged as an attitude that does transpire, yet is often viewed as an approach that is superficial and shallow. Some research even indicates a sentencing disparity where unattractive people are “more likely to be recommended psychiatric care” than attractive people. Prejudice against ugliness is complex: Gretchen Henderson suggests that there is, paradoxically, a cultural suspicion towards both beauty and ugliness.

There are some jurisdictions that already make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of immutable forms of aesthetic appearance, including the Australian state of Victoria, wherein lookism was made illegal in 1995. Similarly, as according to The Economist, Washington DC has laws that prohibit lookism.

Between the years 1867 and 1974, various cities of the United States had unsightly beggar ordinances, in retrospect also dubbed ugly laws. These laws targeted poor people and disabled people. For instance, in San Francisco a law of 1867 deemed it illegal for “any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view.” Exceptions to public exposure were acceptable only if the people were subjects of demonstration, to illustrate the stark separation of disabled from nondisabled and their apparent need for reformation.

The term “ugly laws” was coined in the mid–1970s by detractors Marcia Pearce Burgdorf and Robert Burgdorf, Jr. In 1729 England, punishment was sometimes suggested for people with physical disabilities, whether they were born with disabilities or acquired later in life, who appeared in public.

The Chicago ordinance of 1881 read as follows:

Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, or an improper person to be allowed in or on the streets, highways, thoroughfares, or public places in the city, shall not therein or thereon expose himself or herself to public view, under the penalty of a fine of $1 for each offense (Chicago City Code 1881).

Originating from –able (in disable, disabled) and –ism (in racism, sexism); first recorded in 1981.

Ableism also known as ablism, disablism, anapirophobia, anapirism, and disability discrimination) is discrimination and social prejudice against people with disabilities and/or people who perceive themselves as being disabled. Ableism often characterizes people as they are defined by their disabilities and it also classifies disabled people as people who are inferior to non–disabled people. On this basis, people are assigned or denied certain perceived abilities, skills, or character orientations.

Although ableism and disablism are both terms which describe disability discrimination, the emphasis for each of these terms is slightly different. Ableism is discrimination in favor of non–disabled people, while disablism is discrimination against disabled people.

There are stereotypes which are either associated with disability in general, or they are associated with specific impairments or chronic health conditions (for instance the presumption that all disabled people want to be cured, the presumption that wheelchair users also have an intellectual disability, or the presumption that blind people have some special form of insight). These stereotypes, in turn, serve as prime justifications for discriminatory practices, and also reinforce discriminatory attitudes and behaviors toward people who are disabled. Labeling affects people when it limits their options for action or changes their identity.

In ableist societies, the lives of disabled people is considered less worth living, or disabled people less valuable, even sometimes expendable. The eugenics movement of the early 20th century is considered an expression of widespread ableism.

Ableism can be further understood by reading literature which is written and published by those who experience disability and ableism first–hand. Disability studies is an academic discipline which is also beneficial when non–disabled people pursue it in order to gain a better understanding of ableism.

In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act was put in place to prohibit private employers, state and local government, employment agencies and labor unions from discrimination against qualified disabled people in job applications, when hiring, firing, advancement in workplace, compensation, training, and on other terms, conditions and privileges of employment. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) plays a part in fighting against ableism by being responsible for enforcing federal laws that make it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or an employee because of the person's race, color, religion, sex (including also pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.

Ableism often makes the world inaccessible to disabled people, especially in schools. Within education systems, the use of the medical model of disability and social model of disability contributes to the divide between students within special education and general education classrooms.

Inspiration porn is the portrayal of people with disabilities as being inspirational in stark contrast to able–bodied people, on the basis of their life circumstances. The term "inspiration porn" is by analogy with pornography, in that the material is perceived as objectifying disabled people for the benefit or gratification of the able–bodied. Inspiration porn is a form of ableism. An example of inspiration porn might be photo of a child with a disability taking part in an ordinary activity, with captions targeted towards able–bodied people such as "your excuse is invalid", "before you quit, try" or "they didn't let their disability stop them".

The term was coined in 2012 by disability rights activist Stella Young in an editorial in Australian Broadcasting Corporation's webzine Ramp Up and further explored in her TEDx Talk. About her decisions in naming inspiration porn, Young stated: "I use the term porn deliberately because of the objectification of one group of people for the benefit of another group of people." She rejected the idea that disabled people's otherwise ordinary activities should be considered extraordinary solely because of disability.

Criticisms of inspiration porn include that it "others" disabled people, that it portrays disability as a burden (as opposed to focusing on the societal obstacles that disabled people face), and that reducing disabled people to inspirations dehumanizes them, and makes them exceptionalist examples.

Inspiration porn itself reinforces the awful stereotypes society has given disabled individuals that they are unable and less competent than those who do not have disabilities. After watching a 2016 advertisement titled We're the Superhumans from the Summer Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro, which showed a variety of disabled people accomplishing tasks in athletics, music, the household, and more alongside the repeated message of "Yes I can", a response group of disabled viewers felt it generally exploited disabled people for the pleasure and comfort of the non–disabled.

In 2014, disabled actress Amelia Cavallo described inspiration porn imagery as being "the visualization of disabled people overcoming what seem like broken and substandard bodies, sensory and cognitive make ups" to make "the non–disabled public feel good about their unbroken, able bodies, senses, and cognition." Various forms of inspiration porn ostracize individuals and reduce their identity to be solely their disability. The focus on a single narrative, that all disabled persons are always inspirational, contributes to a lack of accurate understandings of disability identities and to a widespread, unrealistic expectation of heroism for disabled people to live up to.

The Cripple punk movement, established in 2014, directly opposes the portrayal of disabled people as inspiration porn by refusing to conform to normative aesthetic and moral standards, not needing to be 'good' to deserve the conditional support of able–bodied people, and reclaiming the slang crip.

Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is a microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short–form blog. Users can follow other users' blogs. Bloggers can also make their blogs private. For bloggers, many of the website's features are accessed from a "dashboard" interface. As of March 2023, Tumblr hosts more than 572 million blogs.

Development of Tumblr initially began in 2006 during a two–week gap between multiple contracts at David Karp's software consulting company, Davidville. Karp had been interested in tumblelogs (short – form blogs, hence the name Tumblr) for some time and was waiting for one of the established blogging platforms to introduce their own tumblelogging platform. As none had really done so after a year of waiting, Karp and developer Marco Arment began working on their own platform. Tumblr was launched in February 2007, and within two weeks had gained 75,000 users. Arment left the company in September 2010 to work on Instapaper.

Tumblr's headquarters is located at 770 Broadway in New York City. The company also maintains a support office in Richmond, Virginia. As of June 1, 2017, Tumblr had 411 employees. The company's logo is set in Bookman Old Style with some modifications.

Dashboard: The dashboard is the primary tool for the typical Tumblr user. It is a live feed of recent posts from blogs that they follow. Through the dashboard, users are able to comment, reblog, and like posts from other blogs that appear on their dashboard. The dashboard allows the user to upload text posts, images, videos, quotes, or links to their blog with a click of a button displayed at the top of the dashboard. Users are also able to connect their blogs to their Twitter and Facebook accounts; so whenever they make a post, it will also be sent as a tweet and a status update. As of June 2022, users can also turn off reblogs on specific posts through the dashboard.

Queue: Users are able to set up a schedule to delay posts that they make. They can spread their posts over several hours or even days.

Tags: Users can help their audience find posts about certain topics by adding tags. If someone were to upload a picture to their blog and wanted their viewers to find pictures, they would add the tag #picture, and their viewers could use that word to search for posts with the tag #picture.

HTML editing: Tumblr allows users to edit their blog's theme HTML coding to control the appearance of their blog. Users are also able to use a custom domain name for their blog.

Tumblr has received criticism for copyright violations by participating bloggers; however, Tumblr accepts Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices. Tumblr's visual appeal has made it ideal for photoblogs that often include copyrighted works from others that are republished without payment. Tumblr users can post unoriginal content by "reblogging", a feature on Tumblr that allows users to repost content taken from another blog onto their own blog with attribution.

Tumblr has been forced to manage spam and security problems. For example, a chain letter scam in May 2011 affected 130,000 users. On December 3, 2012, Tumblr was attacked by a cross–site scripting worm deployed by the internet troll group Gay N!gger Association of America. The message urged users to harm themselves and criticized blogging in general.

In February 2018, BuzzFeed published a report claiming that Tumblr was utilized as a distribution channel for Russian agents to influence American voting habits during the 2016 presidential election. Despite policies forbidding hate speech, Tumblr has been noted for hosting content from Nazis and white supremacists. In May 2020, Tumblr announced that it will remove reblogs of terminated hate speech posts, specifically Nazi and white supremacist content.

Several countries have blocked access to Tumblr because of pornography, religious extremism or LGBT content. These countries include China, Indonesia, Kazakhstan and Iran. In February 2016, the Indonesian government temporarily blocked access to Tumblr within the country because the site hosted pages that carried pornography. The government shortly reversed its decision to block the site and said it had asked Tumblr to self–censor its pornographic content.

An Internet meme, commonly known simply as a meme, is a cultural item (such as an idea, behaviour, or style) that is spread via the internet, often through social media platforms. Inspired by the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972, internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations. Characteristics of memes include their susceptibility to parody, their use of intertextuality, their propagation in a viral pattern, and of course their evolution overtime.

The term "internet meme" was first proposed by Mike Godwin in 1993, with early memes including images and GIFs spread via messageboards, Usenet groups, and email. With the rise of social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, memes have become more diverse and can spread quickly. More recent genres include "dank" and surrealist memes, as well as short–form videos such as those uploaded on Vine and TikTok.

Memes are considered an important part of internet culture. They appear in a range of contexts (such as marketing, finance, politics, social movements, religion, and healthcare), and use of media from various sources can sometimes lead to issues with copyright.

Internet memes sprout from the first original concept of memes as an element of culture passed on from person to person; for the former, this spread occurs through online mediums such as social media. Though the terms are related, internet memes differ in that they are often short–lasting fads, while traditional memes have their success determined by longevity. Internet memes are also seen as less conceptually abstract compared to their traditional counterpart. There is no single format that memes must follow, and they can have various purposes. For example, they often serve as simply light entertainment, but can also be powerful tools for self–expression, connection, social influence, and political subversion.

Intertextuality may be demonstrated through memes that combine different subjects or aspects of culture. For example, a meme may combine United States politician Mitt Romney's assertion of the phrase "binders full of women" from a 2012 US presidential debate with the Korean pop song "Gangnam Style" by overlaying the text "my binders full of women exploded" onto a frame from Psy's music video where paper blows around him. This gives new meaning to the scene from the music video and blends political and cultural aspects of two different nations.

Memes can involve in–jokes within online communities, which communicate exclusive cultural knowledge unbeknown to general users; through this, a collective group identity can be built. Other memes, in contrast, can have broader cultural relevance and can be understood even by those outside the subculture one would associate with the meme.

A study by Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear explored three characteristics of successful memes identified by Richard Dawkins (fidelity, fecundity, and longevity) in relation to internet memes. It was found that the fidelity of internet memes was better understood as replicability, as memes, though preserving their essence, are often not transmitted entirely "intact" (due to remixing of some sort). Fecundity was postulated to be determined by just three main characteristics: humour (e.g. the comically translated video game line "All your base are belong to us"), intertextuality (e.g. the various pop culture–referencing renditions of the Star Wars Kid viral video), and anomalous juxtaposition (e.g. the Bert is Evil phenomenon). Lastly, a meme's longevity was found to be sustained by the internet itself.

The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as an attempt to explain how aspects of culture replicate, mutate, and evolve (memetics). Emoticons are among the earliest examples of internet memes, specifically the smiley emoticon ":-)" introduced by Scott Fahlman in 1982. The concept of the internet meme was formally proposed by Mike Godwin in the June 1993 issue of Wired. In 2013, Dawkins had characterized an internet meme as being a meme deliberately altered by human creativity–distinguished from biological genes and his own pre–internet concept of a meme, which involved mutation by random change and spreading through accurate replication as in Darwinian selection. Dawkins explained that internet memes are thus a "hijacking of the original idea", evolving the very concept of a meme in this new direction. Furthermore, internet memes carry an additional property that ordinary memes do not: internet memes leave a footprint in the media through which they propagate (for example, social networks) that renders them traceable and analyzable.

based manipulation (i.e. Photoshop).

Two central attributes of internet memes are creative reproduction and intertextuality. The former refers to the tendency of a popular meme to become subject to parody and imitation, which may occur by mimicry or remix. Mimicry refers to reproduction of a meme in a different setting to the original, for example imitation of the "Charlie Bit My Finger" viral video by various individuals. Remix uses the original material of the meme, but alters it in some way using technology

Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post or reply to texts, images and videos known as "tweets". Registered users can tweet, like, "retweet" tweets and direct message (DM), while unregistered users only have the ability to view public tweets. Users interact with Twitter through browser or mobile frontend software, or programmatically via its APIs

Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. Twitter, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California and has more than 25 offices around the world. By 2012, more than 100 million users tweeted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most–visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet". By the start of 2019, Twitter had more than 330 million monthly active users. In practice, the vast majority of tweets are tweeted by a minority of users. In 2020, it was estimated that approximately 48 million accounts (15% of all accounts) were fake.

On October 27, 2022, business magnate Elon Musk acquired Twitter, Inc. for US$44 billion, gaining control of the platform. On December 20, 2022, Musk announced he would step down as CEO once a replacement had been found. As of April 2023, Musk has yet to announce a successor and remains CEO.

Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" first held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, then an undergraduate student at New York University, introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr and the five–character length of American SMS short codes. The decision was also partly due to the fact that the domain twitter.com was already in use, and it was six months after the launch of twttr that the crew purchased the domain and changed the name of the service to Twitter. The developers initially considered "10958" as the service's short code for SMS text messaging, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability". Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 12:50 p.m. PST (UTC–08:00): "just setting up my twttr". Dorsey has explained the origin of the "Twitter" title:

...we came across the word "twitter", and it was just perfect. The definition was "a short burst of inconsequential information", and "chirps from birds". And that's exactly what the product was.

The first Twitter prototype, developed by Dorsey and contractor Florian Weber, was used as an internal service for Odeo employees The full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006.

The number sign or hash symbol, #, has long been used in information technology to highlight specific pieces of text. In 1970, the number sign was used to denote immediate address mode in the assembly language of the PDP–11 when placed next to a symbol or a number, and around 1973, '#' was introduced in the C programming language to indicate special keywords that the C preprocessor had to process first.The pound sign was adopted for use within IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks around 1988 to label groups and topics. Channels or topics that are available across an entire IRC network are prefixed with a hash symbol # (as opposed to those local to a server, which uses an ampersand '&').

A hashtag must first begin with a hash (#) character followed by other characters, and is terminated by a space or the end of the line. Some platforms might require the # to be preceded with a space. Most or all platforms that support hashtags permit the inclusion of letters (without diacritics), numerals, and underscores. Other characters may be supported on a platform–by–platform basis. Some characters, such as & are generally not supported as they may already serve other search functions. Hashtags are not case sensitive (a search for "#hashtag" will match "#HashTag" as well), but the use of embedded capitals (i.e., CamelCase) increases legibility and improves accessibility.

Some communities may limit, officially or unofficially, the number of hashtags permitted on a single post. Misuse of hashtags can lead to account suspensions. Twitter warns that adding hashtags to unrelated tweets, or repeated use of the same hashtag without adding to a conversation can filter an account from search results, or suspend the account. Individual platforms may deactivate certain hashtags either for being too generic to be useful, such as #photography on Instagram, or due to their use to facilitate illegal activities.

A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash symbol, #. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo–sharing services such as Twitter or Tumblr as a form of user–generated tagging that enables cross–referencing of content by topic or theme. For example, a search within Instagram for the hashtag #bluesky returns all posts that have been tagged with that term. After the initial hash symbol, a hashtag may include letters, numerals, or underscores.

The use of hashtags was first proposed by American blogger and product consultant Chris Messina in a 2007 tweet. Messina made no attempt to patent the use because he felt that "they were born of the internet, and owned by no one". Hashtags became entrenched in the culture of Twitter and soon emerged across Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. In June 2014, hashtag was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as "a word or phrase with the symbol # in front of it, used on social media websites and apps so that you can search for all messages with the same subject".