Virtue signaling is term that had some scientific use but is mostly used online by people who don't like your morals, values, etc. Accuse you of doing if you display them at all in a public place. It's meant to be used to shut down anything but the most bland and status quo morality, by turning the simple act of showing any values at all into something nefarious instead something almost universal Someone says they want to hire more women, accuse of virtue signaling, rinse repeat. The thing is it works for literally any normative content.
Thanks. This makes me even more curious what were the values represented by the photos in the carousel, prompting mjolk to call them out as virtue signalling.
In isolation, the photos in the carousel would not lead me to believe that Mozilla is virtue signaling as the photos are just pictures of people. The aggregate message from their ad copy and the specific choice to use loaded terms is what made me aware that they wanted to employ this strategy.
However, to be cheeky, if you wanted to talk solely based on which photos passed editorial approval, compare those represented to the physical attributes of their leadership team: https://blog.mozilla.org/press/media-library/bios/
