It’s Giving Thanks: How Online Were You in November?

Osama drama — Gen Z doesn’t stan Osama bin Laden, but that was the latest moral panic that swept the internet courtesy of users on TikTok and a single post on X. A handful of TikTok videos seemingly praising bin Laden’s “Letter to America” indeed went viral, but only after journalist Yashar Ali publicly claimed it already had, according to the Washington Post. In response, TikTok scrubbed the videos from the platform, while Fox News foamed at the mouth.

Emoji activism — When the Israeli government first prohibited publicly displaying the Palestinian flag in 1967, Palestinians shared the image of a watermelon in its place. The image of a cut-open watermelon features the same red, black, white, and green colors of the flag and is a symbol of Palestinian solidarity that’s endured into 2023 in the form of watermelon emojis and TikTok filters, including one used to raise money in support of civilians in Gaza.

Kelce, caught — While it seems no celebrity is safe from having at least one offensive 2010 tweet still publicly available on their social media, at least Travis Kelce’s were outweighed by a tidal wave of his other early-2010s Twitter dispatches that answer the question: What if Air Bud had joined social media?

Running Rife — Matt Rife is one of the comedians responsible for crowdwork becoming so ubiquitous on TikTok — and if that weren’t bad enough, his actual comedy also stinks. This is something America learned the hard way when his first special debuted and trended on Netflix on November 15 and was rife with content belittling women and making light of domestic abuse. Where’s my Netflix special?

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Smoked out

When renowned marijuana enthusiast Snoop Dogg posted on Instagram and X that he was “giving up smoke” on November 16, he likely thought the news would break the internet. Instead, the internet rolled its eyes. The awkward syntax, the dramatic graphic — people smelled a marketing ploy and they were right. Four days later, Snoop followed up the post with an ad in collaboration with a smokeless firepit company. Some free advice: It’s not giving up weed that would ruin Snoop’s street cred — it’s doing marketing ploys for smokeless firepit companies.

Why it’s a 2: While people on X weren’t buying it, Snoop’s initial announcement garnered write-ups on outlets like CNN and People. But the whole stunt is less notable for the ways it worked and more for the ways it didn’t. The days of celebrity stunt marketing may be behind us — or, at least, it needs to be a little less obvious.

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AI implosion

Why it’s a 2: However you feel about AI, the most prominent company behind the most world-changing technology appearing to have the same caliber of leadership as the seniors in charge of my high-school theater group? Humans: 0. Robots: 123,529,923.

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NoMoOmegle

On November 9, founder Leif K-Brooks announced Omegle is no more. He shared the news in a dramatic open letter that states, among other things, “the fight against crime isn’t one that can ever truly be won.” This may strike a casual Omegle user as unrelated to a randomized video-chat company, but makes a tad more sense when you learn the site’s shuttering comes as a consequence of a 2021 lawsuit accusing Omegle of not properly protecting its users when the plaintiff was sexually assaulted after meeting a man on the website when she was 11 years old. The $22 million suit was settled out of court, days before K-Brooks’s open letter and, if we’re being honest, given *gestures to everything*, years after it probably already should have been.

Why it’s a 2: While Omegle isn’t a website relevant to most adults’ modern lives, that sound you hear is the memories of a million millennial sleepovers burning to ashes.

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Insufficient (creator) funds

TikTok’s creator fund landed in 2020 promising to pay out $1 billion to eligible creators over the next three years. Three years later, we now gaze upon the entire industry of video influencers that TikTok has wrought. The company announced the fund would come to an end on December 16. Despite what it sounds like, $1 billion is a finite amount of money, so the program always had an expiration date — and was allegedly not that great of a fund in the first place. Creators who participated reported single-digit payouts for content that had millions of views, or feeling like their content was being suppressed by the algorithm to prevent it from getting too much engagement. That’s my excuse when no one reads my articles too.

Why it’s a 2: While the creator fund may be ending, TikTok has presented an allegedly more lucrative alternative: the Creator Program, proving that whomever was in charge of the HBOMax-to-Max rebrand got themselves a new gig. A TikTok spokesperson told The Verge that creators in the Creator Program “can earn 20 times the amount they were making under the original fund.” So basically just picture what happened these past three years, times 20. Sounds great!

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Hoodie heartbreak

Technology may change, but the power of a single man’s hoodie is timeless. On November 7, TikTok user Kelly Kim shared the story of a former friend she felt was behaving inappropriately with her boyfriend. This included adding him to her Close Friend story, buying him his favorite sandwich, and, crucially, keeping and wearing his hoodie. While Kelly never named names, her friend outed herself, sharing her side of the story on November 16. Joanna Lee explained that she only got her ex-friend’s boyfriend a sandwich to thank him for mounting her TV, and that she’s “notorious” for not returning people’s hoodies — it had nothing to do with her friend’s boyfriend, specifically. If this sounds like I’m explaining the everyday drama of literally any high school in America, it’s because I am.

Why it’s a 3: Kelly’s and Joanna’s videos collectively received tens of millions of views on TikTok, and a further 115 million on X, thanks to a viral post. However, I’ve docked this whole saga a point, because the hoodie at the center of it is so, so regular that it wasn’t worth any of this.

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Ballinger bounces back

An artist’s sophomore album is always tricky, but I was disappointed to see that Colleen Ballinger’s follow-up to Toxic Gossip Train didn’t contain any ukulele — in fact, in her first vlog back on YouTube, the Miranda Sings creator didn’t sing at all. When we last heard from the longtime YouTuber, it was July and she was defending herself from accusations of behaving inappropriately with her underage fans with lyrics like “I’m not a groomer / I’m just a loser.” But in a video posted on November 18, she calls the apology video “really embarrassing” and announces that she’s ready to move on and return to vlogging. She’s since been posting daily videos, while Miranda Sings still hasn’t been heard from since June.

Why it’s a 3: The “Toxic Gossip Train” video has received over 16 million views, and Ballinger’s follow-up is already sitting at a million. The sheer Schadenfreude of this PR disaster meant even publications like Variety covered her return. However, while it may have made an initial splash, her videos have since settled back into view counts in the 100,000s — right where she was before the allegations dropped.

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NFT v. LED

“Apes, we are aware of the eye-related issues that affected some of the attendees of ApeFest” is the new “cellar door.” On November 3–5, Bored Ape Yacht Club — a once-prominent NFT collection that is somehow still prominent enough to be throwing parties — held a festival in Hong Kong that featured a series of panels and, more memorably, LED lighting on the stage that burned the eyes of at least 15 attendees. While that’s less than one percent of people attending and working at the event, it’s enough for this to be the final moment our collective NFT fever dream is remembered by.

Why it’s a 3: It’s important that The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and any other legacy-media outlet that gave this company initial credence in 2021 see how it paid off.

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Pesto pests

Back in September, TikTok user Susi Vidal made a simple recipe video for pesto. She ended up providing an unwitting prompt for hundreds of people to trauma-dump instead. By beginning her video with an earnest, “Call me crazy, but I don’t like store-bought pesto,” Vidal accidentally invited the irony-poisoned inhabitants of the internet to prove to her what crazy really looked like. Over the following months, the stitches of her video continued to grow until it got so overwhelming she finally addressed it all on November 20.

“My heart goes out to a lot of you,” she says in the video, while making — of course — pesto. She also revealed that a company had reached out to her to partner on a premade, store-bought pesto, but that when she tried it, it wasn’t good. Vidal may be crazy, but she’s a woman of her word!

Why it’s a 4: The “Susi pesto stitch” side of TikTok is a very niche side of TikTok, but in her follow-up video, Vidal herself said she was getting tagged in videos every 30 seconds. The initial video itself has received 18 million views, but it’s safe to say it’s exclusively 18 million of the most online people on earth.

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Closing up shop

Just as the world was reaching for its wallet ahead of Black Friday shopping, a number of TikTok Shop owners woke up to find their accounts had been suspended. TikTok Shop launched in September 2023 as a way for people to sell products directly through the app, resulting in a “For You” page that sometimes felt more like watching QVC than scrolling social media. However, every boom has a bust, and after a surge of graphic T-shirt and pickle shops appeared on the platform, shops reported that the app was cracking down on possible copyright infringements. This was bad news for shop owners, many of whom still had earnings in their accounts that were then inaccessible, but good news for me, who wants to watch craft-inspo and dog-reunion videos without being interrupted by ads for Disney-inspired Stanley Cups.

Why it’s a 4: TikTok Shop appears to be going through the same growing pains already endured by platforms like Etsy in 2021. It’s a tale as old as time, and yet something people never seem to learn: If you want to hawk your unlicensed Taylor Swift merch, just do it on the boardwalk or street corner like normal people.

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Fancam flashback

You never know when the past will come back to haunt you, and in the case of this 2014 Josh Hutcherson fan edit, where. On November 8, TikTok user @misowenfr revived the nearly decade-old piece of fandom art by uploading it to TikTok, where people then turned it into a modern-day Rickroll, jump-scaring viewers by inserting the footage in videos where they’d least expect it. Oh, you thought you were just watching someone step outside for a nice walk? Just kidding, 2014 Josh Hutcherson Edit is the sky. It’s in your fridge. It’s in your Spotify Wrapped. And it’s all over your FYP.

Why it’s a 5: It’s hard to quantify just how popular this meme is, because the whole point is people Trojan-horsing-it onto your feed, so I’ve fallen back on how niche the humor is. If you find this funny — congratulations! You are broken.

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Poop scoop

What if the conversation between your 6-year-old cousins four hours into Thanksgiving was captured on TikTok? If it wasn’t happening between three grown men, that’s what I’d assume was going on in the first “poop deli” video posted by Frankie Dragotto. The concept is simple: When you go to a “poop deli,” you order everything you would at a normal deli and then a little bit of poop on top (or a lot — your poop preference is your own!). “Honestly, I think people are in such a rush nowadays and they’re so serious about everything,” Dragotto says. “Seeing someone joke around about something as simple as poop is hilarious.”

Why it’s a 5: The initial video got 5 million views, but not everyone stuck around to watch the “poop deli” lore continue to expand. There’s “guy who loves to go to poop store tries to pretend he hates the poop store” and “guy who has fear of getting attacked with poop goes to a restaurant,” but also plays on the original, like “evolution of ordering at the poop deli” and “guy who always goes to the poop deli tries to wean off ordering poop.” This is my Fast & Furious franchise.