Put a Bow on 2023: How Online Were You in December?

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Deux Moi faux pas

On November 30, Taylor Swift’s publicist, Tree Paine, spoke for celebrities everywhere when she gave Instagram gossip account Deux Moi a sharp bop on the nose. After months of the account insisting Swift and ex Joe Alwyn had a “marriage ceremony” in 2020 or 2021, Paine firmly denied it in a tweet, calling for the gossipmonger to be “held accountable for the pain and trauma [they] cause with posts like these.” The feud between Swift’s camp and Deux Moi continued throughout the month, with Swift’s pal Keleigh Teller getting involved.

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Netflix, wrapped

Netflix finally released its streaming data, and of all the expensive shows available on the platform in 2023, you’re telling me season one of The Night Agent is the one that claimed 812,100,000 hours of our time?

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Hard launch

After confirming her relationship with producer Benny Blanco, Selena Gomez began fighting for her life against fans who pointed out the artist had seemingly thrown shade at her music in 2020. She’s just like me for real — and by that, I mean repeatedly declaring I’m on a social-media break but then still showing up in everyone’s comment sections.

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Footballer fumble

Anyone who landed Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, only to claim on a sports podcast on December 19 that he was the catch, deserves to have some not-so-silent nights. Even if Green Bay Packer Jonathan Owens didn’t wake up with literal coal in his stocking, he got enough grief across Twitter and Instagram to ruin his Christmas morning — or, it would have, if it seemed like he or Biles cared about the discourse at all.

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Grok^2

Only two people who already named their child X Æ A-Xii could have accidentally (allegedly) come up with the name “Grok.” Elon Musk launched AI chatbot Grok on his cursed social-media platform on November 4. Shortly after, on December 14, Grimes announced she is Grok — that is, she voices a character called Grok for Curio’s upcoming collection of screen-free AI plushies. “Absurdly by the time we realized the Grok team was also using this name it was too late for either AI to change names, so there are two AI’s named Grok now, I can’t wait for them [to] become friends,” Grimes said in a post. How can that sentence contain two Groks, but no words found in the Bible?

Why It’s a 2: This is yet another anecdote suggesting Musk is not a secret mastermind playing chess behind the scenes, but a lucky buffoon who keeps falling ass-backwards into other people’s ideas and claiming them as his own. According to TechCrunch, Curio filed its Grok trademark on September 12, over a month before Musk’s xAI did the same on October 26. Before we hand over our society to our new AI overlords, they need to get their names straight.

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Shotgun wedding

It feels like nobody can throw a $59 million wedding without the looming threat of life in prison these days. Perhaps that’s why Madelaine Brockway and Jacob LaGrone’s French nuptials had a real “go hard or go to jail” vibe to them, complete with a four-day bachelorette trip to a luxury resort, a sleepover at the Palace of Versailles, and the exchanging of vows on a floating platform in the middle of a fountain in the Château de Villette’s gardens. Brockway and LaGrone aren’t rich for any famous reason beyond Brockway’s parents reportedly running some Mercedes-Benz dealerships in Florida, and they weren’t even particularly notably online — until this wedding, which received breathless coverage on TikTok for its extravagance, followed by intense scrutiny once people realized LaGrone appeared in court on November 30 for allegedly opening fire on three police officers. The officers were responding to residents who reported that they heard a gunshot inside a home in their neighborhood, and while no injuries were made public, LaGrone was indicted on three counts of aggravated assault on a public servant and faces anywhere from five years to life in prison — but hey, marriage is life in prison anyway, am I right, fellas?

Why It’s a 2: The details of the Brockway-LaGrone wedding were bonkers enough that everyone needed to have their noses in these rich strangers’ business, from the Washington Post all the way to New Zealand. The only thing crazier than hiring Maroon 5 to sing as your reception entertainment is doing so while simultaneously negotiating a Maroon-25-year plea deal.

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Goodreads gone bad

Pettiness and Goodreads go hand in hand, but never in the site’s history has an author taken it to the extremes of Cait Corrain. The debut author — and devout member of the Star Wars Reylo fandom — had a two-book deal with Random House, with the first, Crown of Starlight, due out in 2024. However, it all came crashing down on December 5 when author Xiran Jay Zhao posted on X about an unnamed author who had been creating fake accounts on Goodreads to post one-star reviews of other debut authors’ books — notably, authors of color like Kamilah Cole, Bethany Baptiste, Molly X Chang, and K.M. Enright — while posting positive reviews of their own. Speculation brewed among authors, and Corrain eventually blamed a “friend” she met in a fandom forum for the review-bombing, even providing screenshots of their conversations as proof. However, inconsistent time stamps and shoddy formatting immediately made people suspicious that the chat had been fabricated — that and the fact that the dialogue was overwrought and unbelievable. It doesn’t bode well if a debut author can’t even fabricate their own conversations.

Corrain should have known better than anyone not to underestimate the Reylo fandom. Affronted to have been dragged into this mess, the community conducted its own investigation and couldn’t find any evidence of this “friend” ever participating in the fandom online. On December 12, as the walls were closing in, Corrain came clean on X. She claimed responsibility for the fake accounts and for fabricating her friend and their conversation, blaming a medication she began in November she says resulted in a breakdown on December 2.

This isn’t the first time Goodreads has found itself at the center of a review-bombing controversy. Over the years, the platform’s toxicity has begun to outweigh its utility thanks to the site’s continued inability to effectively catch and prevent coordinated review attacks from burner suspicious accounts. These campaigns, whether waged by one person or a community, have turned reading into a blood sport. This is something YouTuber Cindy Pham regularly covers on her channel, where she dedicated an entire video to the Cait Corrain saga. “Goodreads could implement a smarter system that recognizes suspicious behavior, such as accounts that rate one star to multiple books all at once, or if one book gets multiple five stars from different accounts belonging to the same IP address,” Pham suggests.

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Gag City, bitch

If the government won’t fund our infrastructure, we’ll just use AI to make our own. I mean, we probably will one day, but it will never look as good as Gag City. While perhaps local politics weren’t the primary motivation behind this AI-generated town (the inciting incident was in fact the new Nicki Minaj album), it’s become almost as legitimate. The bubblegum-pink utopia started as an inside joke on Barbz Twitter back in November when Minaj promised her new album, Pink Friday 2, would take them to “gag city.” In the lead-up to the album’s December 8 release, fans exorcized their excitement by using AI tools to turn “gag city” into an actual place where Minaj rules as the supreme leader and welcomes anyone from Lana Del Rey to Marge Simpson as residents. Brands like Dunkin’ and Chili’s got onboard with their own imagined Gag City storefronts. Gentrification has already begun.

Why It’s a 3: While I certainly wouldn’t say Nicki Minaj stans aren’t powerful (“Gag City” got its own official experience on Roblox, after all), this joke is one of those pieces of fandom lore that’s always going to be too layered to explain properly to a regular person — let alone Stephen Colbert.

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Pandoro’s box

It’s about time for a cakegate that usurps TikTok baker Kylie Rae Allen. Instead, Italian influencer Chiara Ferragni has been fined $1 million after she was found on December 15 to have misled customers with a limited-edition cake she promoted last Christmas. Back in November 2022, in partnership with the Italian pastry brand Balocco, Ferragni hawked a branded pandoro (an Italian Christmas cake similar to a panettone) that cost over twice its normal price. Her Instagram caption implied it was a charity project, the sales from which would benefit children being treated for bone cancer at the Regina Margherita Hospital in Turin, Italy. However, it turns out the company had already made a €50,000 donation that past May, and none of the cake’s sales ever went to charity. Instead, the one million euros earned from the brand deal went only to two companies associated with Ferragni.

In an Instagram post, Ferragni said this was the result of miscommunication and pledged to donate one million euros to the hospital while also challenging the fine, which she believes to be disproportionate to the €420,000 fine given to Balocco. But if anything’s disproportionate here, it’s charging $10 for a plain, dry cake.

Why It’s a 3: Chiara Ferragni has accumulated almost 30 million followers, her own reality show, and even a nod from Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni — granted, it was, according to the Associated Press, in the context of an allusion to creators promoting “expensive panettone, making believe that they are for charity, when the price only pays for millionaires’ fees.” The good news for Ferragni, however, is that although her scandal is now notorious in Italy, the rest of the world is likely too lazy to Google Translate it.

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Poptropica pranked

So much of the beloved early internet has been lost to time, so when it seemed like mid-2000s online role-playing game Poptropica was headed for the same fate, zillennials lost their minds. While the game, founded in 2007, is aimed at ages 6 to 15, a combination of loyalty and nostalgia has kept users young and old hooked until 2023. But on December 14, a Discord post claiming to belong to the official Poptropica account announced that the site would be shutting down on December 30. Viral tweets mourning its legacy abounded, only for the actually official Poptropica account to set the record straight on X the same day. Not only was Poptropica not shutting down, but the hoax generated so much renewed interest that it seems it decided to make the game free for everyone in December.

Why It’s a 4: While Poptropica’s potential demise was huge news, it was only so for the specific demographic of 23- to 30-year-olds who grew up on the role-playing game. Some of us spent our time growing up on the internet doing cooler things, like playing Harry Potter–specific role-playing games.

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Lee misled

If you were to land in JFK and ask for a salmon chopped cheese, the flight attendants would put you back on the plane. But it seems after the world saw what happened when Keith Lee visited Atlanta, some NYC residents set out to sabotage the viral food critic when he brought his taste buds to the Big Apple. Lee sources most of his restaurant recommendations from people in his DMs, but this time, they sent him immediately astray. What started with a salmon chopped cheese spiraled into a bacon, egg, and cheese from Queens, pizza from places like Joe’s in Manhattan, and overall spots that, as one commenter put it, “feel like suggestions from people from Ohio that moved to NYC 2 years ago.”

It got so bad that Lee addressed the backlash once the trip concluded (by then, thank God, he had been to some better restaurants, like Tamarind Island). While Lee said he was fine with getting feedback, he didn’t like how reactions like this could hurt the small businesses he was featuring. Sure, I get it — but salmon chopped cheese? I don’t need to taste it to know a 7.5/10 was too generous.

Why It’s a 4: With not one but two big moments in 2023, Lee is well on his way to hitting mainstream success in 2024. For now, however, his viral moments remain city-specific. Atlanta still hasn’t recovered.

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Cruise crew

If there’s one thing we’ve learned this year, it’s that nothing bad ever happens when you cram a bunch of people on a vessel and send them out to sea. And yet, on December 10, the Royal Caribbean Ultimate World Cruise departed Miami, Florida, and it won’t return until September 10, 2024. In between, it’s traveling through over 60 countries across the Americas and the Asia Pacific, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, the Mediterranean, and Europe — and, yes, there’s Wi-Fi. Which means we have a cast of creators like Brooklyn Schwetje and Amike Oosthuizen who have already earned a following for their promise to take viewers along with them on their, let’s face it, almost certainly doomed endeavor. If you don’t want to do the work of keeping up, then the Andy Cohen of the seas, “Sea Tea” director @nchimad, has got you covered.

Why It’s a 4: While this initial introduction to such a wild adventure is exciting, it’ll be hard to sustain for 250 more days. By February, only the truly dedicated will still be tuning in like it’s week seven of Love Island.

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Overbaked

In December — it’s hard to say exactly when, because the creator has since deleted her account — a baker named Beth lamented how often people asked her what her favorite thing to make is. Her favorite thing to make, she went on to say, is money, and baking is just a job. The one problem with using the internet as a place to vent and blow off steam is that, sometimes, the internet blows steam back. The unexpected hostility coming from someone calling themselves “Beth the Baker” in response to an innocent question about baking rubbed TikTok the wrong way, and in addition to discourse debating the validity of Beth’s frustration, people also created just an incredible number of memes and flooded her comments section with the one question they know she dreads: “What’s your favorite thing to bake???”

Why It’s a 5: You know the drama’s niche when all primary evidence has been wiped from the internet. Luckily for us, this (let’s face it, mild) offense lives on through stitches, duets, and screen recordings, and luckily for Beth, it might just mean she’s never asked to bake again.

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Tweet tournament

Against all odds, Twitter-now-X is leaving 2023 still standing, and while most of the year was spent alienating advertisers and jockeying between different verifications, the people on it somehow still managed to be the most deranged. Internet analyst Jeremiah Johnson selected 64 of the most bizarre and out-of-pocket posts and created a March Madness–style bracket in an attempt to crown a champion. Who will win in the battle between “fictional characters can’t consent” and “why Nazis are bad”? What about “hiking is colonialism” versus “handing it to Bin Laden”? Whatever you think the overall 2023 winner is going to be, you’re wrong.

Why It’s a 5: To know just one of these tweets is something you should keep private; to know enough that you could confidently participate in ranking them does, in my book, make you somehow complicit in their existence.