Social Media and Its Discontents
Neil Gross wants Chumhum to be free of hate speech and enlists Reddick-Boseman to figure out how. After a lot of mishaps, they realize he only wanted to seem to care about hate speech, and picked an African-American firm to blame when it didn't work. Felix Staples, who has never been more excited than when he gets to say the things he would usually only say anonymously on an online forum, out loud in front of a panel, is sorely disappointed when his audience stops caring what lewdness he has come up with in the name of free speech.
Tropes
- Actor Allusion: Elsbeth has someone in her life named Fantasia, alluding to the name of Eric Northman's bar, Fangtasia, in True Blood, where Carrie Preston played Arlene.
- Auto Erotica: Lucca and Colin go for a drive. She can't keep his hands off him, so he pulls over before they crash. The rest is implied.
- Brick Joke: When Marissa prepares to go undercover with Jay, she says she wants her character to be a geologist. Jay says no, because it'd be too easy for people to realize that she knows squat about geology. While they're undercover, someone asks her what she does for a living, and she replies that she's a product analyst who wanted to be a geologist, but her husband (Jay) talked her out of it.
- Central Theme: Is hate speech a matter of free speech?
- Dehumanizing Insult: A lot of internet commenters, as well as Maia's phone harassers, openly fantasize about women getting raped, mutilated, and killed.
- Et Tu, Brute?: Elsbeth had Maia tell her father a false story about her firm taking a bribe, to see if it came back to them somehow, thus figuring out whether he is working against his daughter. The story comes back to them through Colin.
- Loophole Abuse: A lot of bigots have figured out that they can get around online censorship by not actually threatening people, but just saying they hope very specific bad things happen to them or posing hypotheticals. Whenever the lawyers come up with new ways to censor hate speech, the internet bigots find a way to circumvent them.
- Pun: An internet bigot asks if Diane could get him off if he raped a female lawyer.
- Shout-Out:
- An online bigot says that if The Purge was real, he'd rape Zendaya.
- Mr. Staples thinks the lawyers at Reddick & Boseman are like the parents in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
- This Is Reality: Jay and Marissa go undercover to talk to Felix Staples' boyfriend. Marissa wants to be a geologist, but Jay tells her that this isn't a cartoon, and she should say she's a product analyst because no one knows what that is so they can't tell that she's not.
- Twofer Token Minority: Felix Staples is a gay Jewish man and suggests that it means he can say whatever he likes, be it anti-semitic or homophobic.
