Death of the Critic? Part II: Censorship & Rise of Audience Influence

As digital media expands who gets to cover culture, criticism is no longer confined to the formal review. Across film, fashion, music, and art, editorial choice itself has become a kind of critical act. Which designer gets a feature, which album is treated as a cultural event, which artist is given a quick buzz post versus a long-form profile—these decisions shape taste long before a single opinion is even stated.

In that sense, criticism is not simply a metric of taste. It is a question of attention: what is deemed worthy of coverage, who is taken seriously, and which stories are given enough space to become part of the cultural zeitgeist.

Continuing Death of the Critic?, our ongoing series on the changing place of criticism in the MENA digital media landscape, Part II turns from criticism’s disappearance to a stranger question: what does criticism look like now, and why?

The Subject of Critique

There’s been a shift in what gets critiqued. Where the work itself used to be the focal point—read closely, then placed in its social and historical context—the center of gravity has moved. Increasingly, the subject isn’t the art so much as the discourse orbiting it: the memes, the comment wars, the stan narratives, the fan art, the backlash.

The conversation becomes the text.

This represents a new paradigm for critique. Rather than shaping taste (challenging audiences, offering a way to read the work differently), now critics are asked to mirror the audience back to itself. The critic becomes less an interpreter of the work than a translator of the noise around it.

Take Saint Hoax for example, the pseudonymous Syrian internet personality and socio-political activist who uses memes and pop culture as a kind of political shorthand. The object of attention is rarely the artwork itself in any traditional critical sense. It is not, say, a close reading of Elmo as legacy children’s television, but everything that gathers around the moment Ramy Youssef teaches Elmo to say “Salam Alaikum.”

In a compiled carrousel, a tweet reads, “Fun fact! Elmo is actually short for El Mohammed.” In another clip, a Fox news anchor fumes, “Next Bert and Ernie will be praying 5 times a day. Leave the Arabic immersion to someone else.” Suddenly, the children’s segment, the jokes, the backlash, and the meme responses all become part of the same cultural object. News, media, and commentary melt into one another, until the discourse becomes what is worth covering.

This push-and-pull between the artwork itself and the audience isn’t new, but critics respond to it differently. Fashion critic, Osama Chabbi, leans into it: “I like to understand the noise in the room, not necessarily to influence my thoughts, but more so to know if I agree or disagree with the larger dynamic and respond to it.” Omar Ghonem, Music Editor at Ma3azef, takes the opposite approach: “I don’t think you should be concerned with the audience. You should just voice your opinion about a body of work…I’ve reconciled that what I write will not be read by a lot of people. I think of it more as a reference point.”

This highlights an age-old tension: where does meaning actually derive from, in the writer or the audience receiving it?

French philosopher, Roland Barthes, famously argued in his essay the “Death of the Author” (1967) that meaning is not dependent on author’s intentions or biography, rather that interpretation begins with the reader.

Ahmed Shawky, veteran Egyptian film critic and President of the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI), largely agrees with the spirit of Death of the Author: “It is my personal belief that a big part of creativity is based on the subconscious of the artist. The artist shouldn't be aware of every meaning or every interpretation that his or her work might trigger in an audience or in a film critic,” he says. “Mohamed Khan, for example, the late Egyptian filmmaker, told me that some elements of his own films, he wasn't aware of until the critics expressed it clearly in their articles. And then he became aware of it and he started to visit it consciously in his next films. So I completely believe in this.”

At the same time, Shawky warns that online interpretation can tip into excess, “the internet brings us everything in its best and worst aspects, it is becoming too much.”

The current social media ecosystem has become almost a hyperbole of Barthes’ rhetoric, especially given that less people are reading longform writing and most articles are consumed through Instagram slides or captioned reels. Even I sometimes catch myself simultaneously scrolling through comments while watching a reel to see people’s interpretation, before I even finished watching the video itself. I’m not focused on the art—but on how people engage with it.

More than ever, with our limited attention spans, audience discourse has become the story's point of origin.

Audience Censorship

Shawky points to how this shift has now moved who holds the power of censorship. “In the new age of criticism, the big question now is the censorship of the collective opinion of the audience, more than the formal, classic, state censorship.”

In his view, you can see it most clearly in the new class of critics with massive followings. Their metrics for critique isn’t driven necessarily by fear of upsetting filmmakers or even the authorities, so much as the audience's expectations and the algorithms that reward engagement. He argues that many end up reviewing with an eye on the ‘right’ talking points, not because the film demands it, but because deviating from it risks audience backlash, lost views, and a drop in relevance. While he credits that it’s “empowering that some of these critics are now making a living from YouTube content, which is a great achievement in an age where most film critics struggle to sustain a decent living," he sees a tradeoff. “It’s difficult not to become a follower of your followers. And it shouldn't be this way; it should be the opposite. It should be you trying to give an example or to enlighten the audience with certain ideas.”

Censorship is not new – it’s existed – through institutions, editorial lines, or cultural taboos. But Shawky argues there’s something uniquely volatile about the kind that comes from the audience:

“If you work in an official newspaper, you deal with the institution, if you work in a film festival, you deal with the censorship of the Ministry of Culture. Those are solid entities, you can understand their philosophy, you can find a way to bypass it. You even can expect what will work and what will not work with them. But when it comes with a bigger audience, it's very fluid. And it's dynamically changing every day. I feel like there's been a trade-off of either you have freedom intellectually or financially. Before they weren't as mutually exclusive in a way.”

If Shawky names the shift, Céline Semaan, founder of Slow Factory and publication Everything Is Political, has lived its consequences. Most pieces Semaan publishes sit at the intersection of climate justice, culture, and independent media, foregrounding Global South perspectives and explicitly framing storytelling as a tool for liberation. But that clarity of position also comes with a cost online. “I can attest that being in conversation with the public, and the public being 40 million people, feels like we become a punching bag.”

Semaan’s work isn’t cultural criticism in the classic sense, but similarly to Saint Hoax, uses art and pop culture and geo-politics as means to critique larger systems at play. In this new form of media and criticism, the stakes have become higher. As Shawky puts it, when you critiqued a work of art before “you [would] meet the artist once a year, but now you meet the audience every day.”

What happens when social media as the public square becomes the newsroom?

In this new media landscape, Semaan’s work offers a blueprint for what journalism becomes when social media collapses the distance between witness, writer, and reader. Semaan describes her starting point as “collective disillusionment,” an approach that acknowledges the rupture of belief systems that govern the world - democracy, equality, neoliberalism, and so forth. “Since October 2023, the beginning of the genocide in Palestine, something has shattered in the West—the illusion of international law, the illusion of democracy. Folks in the Global South know that there's no such thing as democracy – the game is rigged. Especially when it came to Israel, because Israel's tagline as a brand had always been the only democracy in the Middle East, which was the first thing that was shattered when the genocide began. The West began to reckon with the fact that they don't have a democracy.”

With this shift, the old trust people had in legacy media has started to deteriorate. Audiences are more media-literate, more suspicious of institutional authority, and far less willing to accept “objective journalism” as a neutral god-term. Once, you might have understood a war almost exclusively through the eyes of correspondents and foreign desks. Now, Instagram and TikTok offer direct access to people on the ground, competing sources, and new trusted voices whose authority comes less from masthead credibility than proximity and lived experience.

Through The Slow Factory, Semaan isn’t proposing the critic as judge, but the journalist as enabler—someone who hands the pen outward. In her framework, the work is less about reviewing culture from a (safe) critical distance and more about building a public record with the people living through it. The shift is from commentary to movement journalism, where the purpose is not to speak for the public, but to make room for the public to speak.

Algorithm Censorship

Of course, that multiplicity runs directly against the logic of the platforms carrying it. Social media may expand who gets to speak, but it also rewards the cleanest binaries, funnels certain stories to certain audiences, and builds echo chambers while pretending to show us “what we like.”

Semaan is acutely aware of this contradiction. “I'm proud that we do reach folks that don't necessarily have access to the type of information we're outputting,” she says. “But that means we also face a lot of backlash and criticism. That's why we insist on the idea that if that's not right, then here's the pen, write what's right.”

It is a neat inversion of the usual media stance, not trust our credentials, but show us what we missed. Semaan argues for “elasticity and curiosity,” even as, in her words, “we’re in a polarizing world right now. It feels like us-versus-them on every single issue.” In other words, everyone might have a voice now, but the room is still very bad at listening.

While audience backlash is constant, algorithm censorship doesn’t just push certain narratives, it also has the power to completely erase.

As Semaan attests, “shadow-banning has become even more complex and more developed from platforms like Meta and Instagram.” To work around this, her team began thinking almost like smugglers of information—working with coders to understand how platforms flag content, stripping out trigger words, and leaning on illustrations and memes to find small loopholes that slip through the filters. It is absurd, but completely rational. When the platform punished a journalist for writing, they need to learn to write around the machine.

This work around triggered an even bigger shift: “We realized that all of our eggs were in one basket. Several times Meta shut down Slow Factory for weeks on end where we couldn't even access our account anymore. We were afraid ultimately is that everything's going to disappear.” To combat this, Everything is Political was built, as Semaan puts it, “as an independent media [platform] for the sole purpose of archiving this information.” Structured around a subscription model, it asks audiences to become members rather than passive consumers—to invest, quite literally, in protecting the freedom of the press and the public record that platform censorship can too easily erase.

The Economic of it All

When asked what was needed for more of this type of yes-and journalism, we ended on the same conclusion as in Part I: Death of the Critic?: more money.

Less romantic, then let’s say courage, but usually more useful.

Music journalist Danny Hajjar points to the industry at large, “the media industry, globally, is seeing such a radical shift to the point where there is no longer any sort of financial backing, funding, or investment for writers and journalists.” But for Mille World journalist Yassine Harris the problem is not only that money is disappearing; it’s that what remains is too concentrated. “[The industry] needs to decentralize finances and decentralize power,” he says “Ultimately, it's the same 20 people running this industry.”

For Semaan, then, one answer lies in strengthening independent media. “We need resources to support independent media,” Semaan continues. “How are we to continue, expected to work under pressure and under intense criticism coming from everywhere? It’s mission impossible but we’re stubborn and structured and organized and relentless—but we do need support. We have the responsibility to do better. And some of us are taking that responsibility seriously.”

It is a blunt answer, but maybe the only honest one. Criticism cannot survive on moral urgency alone, and movement journalism cannot be sustained by burnout dressed up as purpose. If the journalist is now expected to report, contextualize, archive, withstand backlash, outsmart algorithms, and build alternative platforms when the old ones fail, then the question of funding stops being an operational concern and becomes an editorial one.

What gets written about becomes part of the record. And what becomes part of the record shapes what future audiences understand as culture and politics. The work may begin with handing the pen outward, but the critic is still there to enable conversations, maintain a yes-and mentality, and make sure the page does not disappear the moment a media platform or PR company decides it has become inconvenient.