‘Cards Against Humanity’s Black Friday Prank Skewered the Social Media Wars
Cards Against Humanity, the card game that’s all about shock factor and cheap humor, has taken the opportunity to laugh at the world of social media, and the tech moguls that run it, for its annual Black Friday prank.
The past year has seen a war waged on and about social media, with Facebook/Instagram parent company Meta and X (formerly Twitter) trying to outplay each other at the expense of their actual users. At one point, CEOs Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk were actually preparing for some real fisticuffs, which would have been both ridiculous and morbidly entertaining.
CAH has taken this year’s prank as an opportunity to take a little jab at the crumbling world of social media (X is apparently only worth $19 billion according to The New York Times, quite a step down from the $44 billion Musk paid for it). On November 25, CAH came out with its own social media platform, Yowza, posting on X,
“It’s Black Friday, and social media is tearing us apart. Lies. Hate. Crypto enthusiasts. You deserve something better. Introducing #Yowza, our new platform guaranteed to be free of misinformation, hate speech, and bad vibes of any kind. #FuckXJoinYowza“
Speaking to Ad Age, a spokesperson for the company said,
“We’ve been watching Elon Musk transform into a parody of himself with his increasingly bizarre and asinine decisions with Twitter. We’ve seen an indistinguishable morass of alternatives trying to be the ‘Twitter killer,’ only to be met with confusion and apathy.”
They also took jabs at other platforms adding, “Instagram gives your children body dysmorphia, TikTok shares your data with the Chinese Communist Party and X has become a safe space for Nazis and crypto enthusiasts. There’s got to be a better way.”
So how does it ensure, in this day and age, that hate speech and bad vibes are kept off of Yowza? Simple. Users can only post the word “Yowza.” Okay … so why would people join this? Well, as CAH are wont to do during pranks, it’s the inverse of the goal of most businesses during Black Friday, which is to squeeze as much money from customers as possible. When users refer other users to Yowza, they are put in a jackpot to win cash prizes, with the grand prize having been placed at $69,420.
Yes, they went with the immature 69/420 combo, which is another jab at Elon Musk, according to the site’s FAQ section: “Ugh, are all of these awful 69s and 420s a painfully unfunny reference to Elon Musk’s juvenile obsession with those numbers? Yowza.” A winner has already been found for the grand prize, with user @sparks claiming the top amount, while the first 10,000 users to refer received a sum of $4.20.
This isn’t the first time CAH has just given money away. This “philanthropic” effort has taken many forms over the years, from buying land to block Donald Trump’s Mexican border wall in 2017 to encouraging people to get vaccinated in 2021. However, time has revealed that the creators of a “Card Game For Horrible People” were, in fact, not very nice people themselves (“quelle surprise”) which kind of adds a sour note to all this.
For a company built on ironic hate, misogyny, racism, ableism, and more, it’s kind of ironic that it thinks it can point the finger at anyone given the accusations that were levied against the company’s creators a few years ago, which resulted in the resignation of co-founder Max Temkin.
That very year, CAH decided that rather than create an elaborate prank, they would simply donate their $250,000 Black Friday budget to various charities such as the National Low-Income Housing Coalition and Equal Justice Initiative among other charities that supported causes they “cared” about, such as Black Lives Matter—despite racism being one of the very alleged issues contributing towards a toxic work culture at the company. Yeah, sure.
Join Yowza, don’t join Yowza … while I agree that social media has become a toxic mess, this is a revolution that I’m fine not being a part of.
(featured image: Cards Against Humanity)
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