Virtue signaling is the act of uttering something publicly (on social media, putting up an image or video, as a press release, etc) showcasing how totally great and virtuous you are, generally by saying something super safe with your in-group that no one disagrees with. A key attribute of virtue signaling is doing something trivial that does not actually push toward making the world a better place (for example, Greta Thunberg’s yacht trip to Gaza that ended, as anyone could predict, with her and her crew being turned around for their own safety was nothing more than a virtue signaling event).
Virtue signaling is a type of attention farming. It is practiced primarily (but not exclusively) by the woke left, who have turned it into a lifestyle.
Examples
- Shouting “Trans rights are human rights!”
- This doesn’t mean anything, it just sounds nice and gives the shouter a quick dopamine hit.
- Shouting “Trans women are women”
- This MEANS something, it’s just objectively wrong. Which is fine, because the point is never to be accurate—it is to virtue signal.