• What celebrity sued a book publisher for printing a book calling him the "world's
greatest human?"
How did memes result in 10 people getting their admission to Harvard revoked?
Here are 10 examples of people who wished they'd never gone viral.
10 –Kiesha Johnson – Confused Girl • 16-year-old Kiesha Johnson had no intention
of ever becoming a meme.
Her friends took a picture of her making a confused, exasperated pose, and posted it
to Instagram.
• But things took off from there, as the pose became an image macro to basically sum
up "WTF" in a single shot.
• Johnson was understandably upset, since it wasn't even her that posted it to Instagram,
and before long, millions of people were sharing the photo.
• But her biggest issue with it isn't the fact that it's been shared a bunch.
It's just that she thinks it's a bad picture of her.
• In her own words, she says, "My face looked ugly like I was about to throw up.
I look nothing like that in real life."
9 – Wedding Entrance Dance • Back in 2009, Kevin Heinz and Jill Peterson
posted a video of a choreographed wedding dance down the aisle to Chris Brown's "Forever,"
mostly so they could show it to friends and family who couldn't make it to the actual
wedding.
• But within a few days, the video had a million views, they were getting asked to
perform at weddings, and reporters were starting to ask them for interviews.
• Rather than piggyback off the internet fame, they ended up turning their phones off
and letting it blow over.
• Worst of all, because the video used Chris Brown's song without permission, they never
actually made any money from the video's success.
The video money went straight to Sony and Chris Brown himself, and the two-year-old
song shot back into the top 10.
8 – Cinnamon Challenge • The "Cinnamon Challenge" was just
one in a series of YouTube "challenges."
Most of them were harmless, and there was reason to believe the Cinnamon Challenge was
as well.
• After all, cinnamon is great, right?
It makes things taste good.
• Well, that's true in small quantities.
If you take a spoonful of it, it turns out that it's caustic and can cause severe respiratory
issues, including COLLAPSED LUNGS.
• So yeah, don't do the cinnamon challenge.
Ever.
7 – Chuck Norris • You would think that the whole "Chuck
Norris Facts" would be flattering to the man himself.
• But apparently, Chuck Norris isn't a huge fan of people talking about how he can
impregnate both men and women with a single glance.
• Or how his push-ups don't push him up, he pushes the earth down.
• When a book of those "facts" hit store shelves, Norris sued both the author and the
publisher, saying the book "hurt his reputation.
• Though the book refers to him as the "World's Greatest Human," so how harmful was it,
really?
6 – Slender Man • The urban legend known as Slender Man
started as a harmless internet creepypasta in 2009, spawning a number of stories and
even a successful survival-horror video game.
• But it also drove a 12-year-old girl to stab her best friend.
• Morgan Geyser was at a slumber party was some friends, and when they went out into
the woods together, Geyser stabbed one of the girls 19 to "impress Slender Man."
• Geyser was sentenced to 40 years in a mental hospital, and a friend, who stood by
encouraging the stabbing, was sentenced to 25.
• Luckily, the girl who was stabbed actually survived the incident.
5 – Tide POD Challenge • After Tide released their new line of
Pods in 2012, poison control centers almost immediately reported an uptick in children
coming in after ingesting detergent.
• But it didn't really reach meme status until December of 2015, when The Onion posted
an opinion piece written from the perspective of a young child, entitled, "So Help Me
God, I'm Going To Eat One Of Those Multicolored Detergent Pods."
• This led to a series of YouTubers and humor sites writing jokes about eating Tide
Pods.
And at some point, some people on Reddit started actually doing it.
• Now a bunch of stores keep Tide Pods in locked cabinets on store shelves… which
is probably not what Tide had in mind for them.
4 – Harvard Class of 2021 • When a bunch of incoming Harvard freshmen
joined a group called "Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens," they decided the
best way to introduce themselves was to be as edgy and offensive as possible.
• People started posting memes about child abuse, school shootings, the Holocaust, and
pedophilia, and several people in the group left and reported the memes.
• Those reports resulted in 10 peoples' admissions being rescinded, because Harvard
doesn't particularly want people on its campus that joke about murdering millions
of people or having sex with children.
3 – Confession Meme • The "confession bear" meme has been
used over the years to portray some unpopular opinions.
• But when one person used it to confess to getting away with murder, things got ugly.
• The meme stated that the poster killed his sister's abusive meth addict boyfriend
with his own drugs while he was sleeping, and the police ruled it an overdose.
• Unfrotunately for him, the meme took off, and he started getting asked questions.
A lot of questions.
• His story started unravelling, and soon he backed down to saying that "parts"
of the story were true.
But then the FBI started asking questions, and soon enough he admitted that he'd made
the whole thing up.
2 – Pepe the Frog • Matt Furie created Pepe the Frog as part
of a comic strip that he started writing in 2005 on MySpace.
• By the last 2000s, Pepe had become a popular meme.
• But eventually, the character was co-opted to be a symbol of white supremacists and the
alt-right, and was soon recognized as an international hate symbol.
• Furie called the co-opting of the character a "nightmare."
Soon, he decided that the only thing he could do was to kill off Pepe the Frog in his own
comic.
• Furie figured Pepe was better off dead then as a Nazi.
1 – Ugandan Knuckles • When VRChat took off in 2017, the undisputed
star of the show was Ugandan Knuckles.
The growth of the meme is undoubtedly one of the biggest reasons VRChat took off so
quickly.
• But the creator of the Ugandan Knuckles skin now kind of wishes he hadn't.
• The VRChat community is important to him, and he's afraid it has gone from a place
where people can actually have conversations, to a place where thousands of people just
show up to make the same unfunny joke over and over.
• He has since posted on his original DeviantArt post asking people not to use Ugandan Knuckles
to "bug" other users, and to not "let it be another Second Life."
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