The COVID-19 pandemic changed a lot of things in many aspects of everyone's lives. The early lockdowns caused a huge increase in traffic and activity for most websites, as a lot of people had to figure out ways to pass time. Boredom brought out the best and worst of everyone.

Having learned lessons from the consequences of the previous era, many mainstream websites decided to start banning the most obvious fake news and white supremacists, putting an end to the dominant position of the alt-right in online discourses, allowing for a more mainstream conversation over sociocultural topics from all sides of the political spectrum. While not silencing oppressors, and even causing them to become more vocal and active in some cases, this still allowed the voices of many oppressed groups to begin to be heard.

In the meantime, memes were going back to their roots, moving away from the absurdist dank memes, once again taking the form of media understandable and easy to produce by regular people. Not a fad anymore, they had now become a regular way like any other for people to express themselves.