How my Viral Barbie Tweet United America
On Saturday, January 4th at 10:52 P.M. I tweeted a photo of two of my daughter’s Christmas presents to my 205 Twitter followers. It was my first tweet in over four months. It would be retweeted 2,682 times, with 12,200 likes in over 829,974 people’s news feeds. Not to mention the millions of people viewing it on Facebook, Instagram and Reddit. My Barbie tweet went viral.
My mother gifted my daughter, Grace a Barbie camper van, a modern version of a toy my sister had 30 years earlier. My wife’s sister gifted her a Barbie science lab from a new series of “Barbie can be anything” playsets. It came complete with a Bunsen burner, beakers, and a heart-shaped test tube.
When I saw the two next to each other, I laughed out loud. TV viewers would know there is a show called ‘Breaking Bad’. It is widely considered one of the best shows of all time and follows a cancer-ridden chemistry teacher who becomes a drug kingpin.
It is, by all accounts, the exact opposite of Barbie: Malibu vs. Albuquerque. Dream-house vs. Meth-house.
But the way the protagonist, Walter White, starts his blue crystal drug empire is with a science lab… in a camper.
A little over a week after Christmas, I was still enjoying a private laugh over my daughter’s new toys. I snapped a quick photo of the playsets next to each other with a smiling Barbie wearing a rainbow shirt, red high heels and protective science goggles (safety first!). I posted the photo to my Instagram and Facebook accounts, then went about my day. That evening I noticed my friends were responding to the photo. People I hadn’t heard from in a while had hit the like button. I dusted off my Twitter app, and copied the post over, hit send, then went to sleep.
When I checked Twitter the next morning, five of my followers had retweeted the photo. This was on par with the most retweets any of my tweets had ever received. A smashing success! I checked back in that afternoon and looked at the impressions, which Twitter explains as “the times people saw your Tweet on Twitter.” It had reached 140,759 people and been retweeted over 400 times. Whoa. By day’s end, the tweet had 250,000 impressions and one thousand retweets.
It was curious: the post was viral on Twitter but had not become anywhere near as popular on my Facebook or Instagram pages. (Maybe Zuckerberg prefers My Little Ponies?) The next day, I updated my friends that the tweet had gone viral. They started replying that they had seen the picture on Facebook too, except it wasn’t my original post.
A friend sent me a Facebook page that had copied my tweet. It belonged to a woman named Scarlet Magdalene. She is a self described “Greek Polytheist, Priestess of Apollo, Witch, Asexual, Professional Nerd, and Part Time blogger.” Her posts, mostly championing liberal causes, average between one and 10 shares. Yet somehow, her copying of my tweet became the epicenter of Facebook viral sharing. Her Facebook post of my tweet had received 28,000 shares and nearly 3,000 likes. In her own comments section, she tracked the shares and gushed how she went viral.
This begged the question: Can you take credit for going viral when you didn’t create the content?
The answer to that question is: On the internet, obviously you can.
She had left my Twitter handle on her post, so it was clear I was the one who originally created the content. It was just her stream that found the ocean, while mine stopped at a quiet pond with only 13 shares and 168 likes.
I began scouring online to see who else shared my photo. Starting with the Barbie hashtag on Instagram, I scrolled for my photo. Within seconds, I hit pay dirt. This time it was a self-described single mother of three that quoted the heavy metal band Pantera in her profile, and posted about protecting the second amendment. Probably the opposite of my polytheistic witch from earlier. The mom had copied my photo and cropped out my Twitter handle, erasing me from the credit as creator. Her post had only 14 likes. I’ll let you draw your own conclusion about whether the left or the right values artistic credit and the social media karma behind that.
One thing was undeniable: my Tweet was bringing people together. It was something the Left and Right could agree on. What other groups was it connecting?
A third friend sent me a message. She had seen the picture on a Reddit she follows called TrollXChromosomes. It had been posted there by someone who pulled it off Imgur, where it had been viewed 110,199 times. As an elder millennial, I have never participated in Reddit or Imgur but I take joy in the fact that their Gen Z users appreciated my tweet.
It was clear that the Millennials and Gen Z had found my photo, but what about the Boomers?
A fourth friend sent me a screenshot of an email from her father-in-law. It read:
“Jim, a guy I used to work with … belongs to a Facebook group called Beyond the Far Side where people post Far Side cartoons and other bits of humor. Jim was reposting something which he apparently picked off Twitter.”
Then, clear as day, was a picture of my tweet. I can’t think of anything more representative of a Boomer’s comedy tastes than an underground Far Side comic share group.
The comments on my Tweet were a melting pot of race, gender and language, all playing together in my silly joke premise. #BreakingBarbie memes were shared with each other in celebration of the joke. Now it’s your turn to go out and unite the country. Mash up your favorite prestige TV drama with your favorite childhood toy. Your country needs you!
