Now that social media has become a full-fledged ecosystem, with its own distinctive fauna, it seems useful to offer a taxonomy of its more common denizens. The catalogue has an American inflection, but can easily be adapted so as to apply wherever you find yourself, and while my encounters with the species described here have been largely on Bluesky, they inhabit every social media platform on the World Wide Web.

The Mother Hen

These online saints have taken it upon themselves to minister to tens of millions of people online whom they don’t know. They will offer tips for improving your mental, physical, and spiritual health, “friendly” and “gentle” reminders about things to which you should pay more attention, marital and other relationship advice, and inspirational and self-affirming messages, all unsolicited and offered daily at no cost. Their benevolence and generosity are matched only by their irritation when catching even the faintest whiff of negativity, which must be snuffed out whenever it appears.

The Enthusiast

A fan for whom it is urgent to tell the world about everything that he or she likes, whether movies, TV shows, musical acts, or books. While this may seem too common a quality to delineate a particular personality type, Enthusiasts are distinguished by their fierce and categorical refusal to tolerate any deviation or dissent. Disagreement constitutes “Yucking their yum” and “Jumping into their mentions” and makes you a “reply guy,” and in this regard, Enthusiasts share the ruthless positivity of Mother Hens. If you have the misfortune of liking something made by a Bad Person, however, Enthusiasts instantly transform into Scolds. (See below)

The News Breaker

An expert on the Bloody Obvious, this is the person who comes along to tell everyone that “Shooting protestors dead in the street is authoritarian!” “Taking bribes is corrupt!” “Forcibly deporting children with cancer is wrong!” and the like. This social media personality may share space on a Venn Diagram with The Tough Guy (see below) and The Scold, but often operates in his or her own distinctive space, as a kind of Walter Cronkite of tautology. 

The Scold

Express the wrong view, use the wrong words, eat the wrong food, like the wrong band, drive the wrong car, watch the wrong movie or show, and The Scold is there to make sure that you are “held accountable.” As self-deputized moral enforcers, Scolds are ever vigilant, ready to express outrage on behalf of people whom they have nothing to do with and browbeat and berate complete strangers who’ve done nothing to them. Though rare, one may occasionally encounter an individual who is simultaneously a Mother Hen and a Scold, a formidable and unpredictable creature that is best given a wide berth.

The Pet Whisperer

This social media poster has mastered the languages of house pets, which apparently consists of broken and misspelled words and sentences belonging to human languages that when uttered aloud make it sound as if one is three years old and suffers a persistent lisp.       

The Celebrity

The Celebrity’s posts suggest that he is a person whose actions and words are of great moment. He will apologize for “not streaming last night” or “not posting lately” to millions of people who have no idea who he is; declare that “I will not support any candidate who does ____,” as if some Congressman’s or Senator’s political fortunes hang on his vote; and pronounce on things as if everyone in the world was waiting for him to weigh in. Counterintuitively, the degree of Celebrity this species of poster manifests is inversely proportional to the influence and following the individual actually has.

The Apocalypticist

Tasked with destroying public morale and spreading hopelessness across the land, The Apocalypticist greets us each morning with a hearty “We’re cooked, folks!” and “Democracy is dead” and then goes on to post articles reporting how many species have gone extinct since the industrial revolution, link to polar ice cap melting countdown clocks, offer “periodic reminders” that the only thing protecting the planet from utter devastation is a flimsy magnetic field, and other such cheerful fare. One would think that a person who believed the end was imminent would eschew posting online and spend what little time remains with their friends and loved ones, so the perennial quality of The Apocalypticist’s posting can be a source of puzzlement for many. 

The Porn Star

For those who never realized how much they needed to see a hairy butthole or engorged penis as they scroll through the headlines on their morning commute in a crowded train or bus, The Porn Star is there to supply the photos. Alas, when encountering such characters online, one rarely is graced by a vision of a person whose body and intimate parts one would actually want to see. When questioned about this demonstrably uncivil behavior, The Porn Star tells everyone to “Just keep scrolling,” as if exposing oneself to tens of millions of unwilling strangers is the most normal thing in the world and you just need to get with the program.

The Beggar

Why donate to the world’s impoverished or those whose countries are ravaged by war, famine and disease, when you can contribute to random social-media posters’ “Buy me a coffee” pitches and “Go Fund Me” campaigns and thereby make it possible for them to continue not making a living from their Twitch streams and YouTube channels?

The Artist

Posts endless floods of Anime, furries, eroticized versions of popular superhero characters, and combinations of all three. From the sheer amount of this stuff one encounters in art feeds, one might think that The Artists are legion, but they may in fact just be a single person operating under multiple pseudonyms, given how generic and indistinguishable from one another these “artworks” are.

The Tough Guy

Posturing, flexing, and perpetually ready for a fight, this character is always punching Nazis, storming the White House or Supreme Court, and threatening to clean Bad People’s clocks. All online, of course.

The Book Bragger  

An inhabitant of literature and book feeds, this person read 867 books this year and is going to tell you about it. One may also encounter a humblebragging version of this character who laments how he would have read 867 books this year, but due to his many and varied personal misfortunes (often itemized) was only able to read 732.

The Aimless

This may be the most common of all the creatures one finds in online social spaces: the person whose postings demonstrate no discernable purpose or aim, but are nonetheless plentiful. Much like those who find silences of any duration intolerable and are compelled to fill the air with an unrelenting stream of pointless verbiage, The Aimless can’t help but do the same thing online, with their gratuitous offerings often being prefaced by, “I don’t know who needs to heart this, but…”