Weekly Internet Roundup: Joe Exotic Launches Presidential Bid, Banks Collapse, and Dates Get Ditched Over Burger Cheese

Greetings, and welcome back to another helping of things that have captured the attention of the internet this week. In all honesty, it feels like things I have taken a political turn. Hard to imagine given the sheer amount of discourse already on social media, I know. Without further ado, here are some examples of that. The levels of derangement may vary.

Tiger President Coming Soon?

Ah, early 2020. A terrible time in which everyone was baking banana bread, celebrities decided to sing to us, and every other conversation seemed to be about the Tiger King. The documentary series about the underworld of big cat breeding and rescue was successful enough to stretch out into a wild two seasons. It also made living memes out of its two antagonists, and documented one of them landing in jail for animal abuse and attempted murder for hire of his sworn enemy. 

It's fair to say that Joe Exotic has led quite the life, but most would probably agree that it doesn't qualify him for high office. That's not what he seems to think, though, as he has announced that he is running for President in 2024.

You might think that federal prison would put a stop to his ambitions, but the disgraced media personality has insisted on his campaign website that his ambitions are “not a joke”. America: it's the land of opportunity.

Pour One Out For the Tech Bros

Hey, how about that possible impending financial crisis? Crazy times! Silicon Valley Bank is the institution that has propped up a thousand different tech startups of varying usefulness, and it very publicly went bust late last week. I'm no financial expert (and there are countless sanctimonious Twitter threads explaining how this came to be), but I do know that something like this is the perfect breeding ground for a lot of dumb posting about it. If we've learned anything from the past decade, it's that any potentially society-altering event is going to be memed through with a passion, and this is no exception. It's just a shame that it is difficult to make investments sound funny.

TikTok and the Governmental Stamp of Disapproval

The US is once again flirting with the prospect of a total ban on TikTok, after reports that Joe Biden has insisted that the Chinese owners of the site must divest their stakes in it. Following in the footsteps his predecessor, it would likely be challenging to get through the US courts.

While concerns about spying have led to the app being banned on government and certain company phones, for now the whole thing still seems like a lot of hot air. With the sheer amount of people who are addicted to it, we're going to guess that if the accusations are true, this method would be more effective but less memeable than a spy balloon.

Oh Good, Another Insane Dating Rule

Speaking of TikTok, there is an epidemic sweeping Gen Z's favorite social media — and I'm not talking about the impressive volume of cringe it manages to generate. No, it's all to do with the highly depressing world of dating content. When the platform isn't pumping out dubious dating coaches claiming that we're idiots for sex on the first date, it's feeding us stories of terrible date experiences for our viewing pleasure. 

This well-trodden genre was added to recently by @dafna_diamant, who seemed to be expecting support when she posted a TikTok complaining about her Hinge date's refusal to pay $3 extra for a slice of cheese on his burger. 

Claiming that the incident had caused her to pay the bill and walk about, viewers were so bamboozled at her attitude that it made national news in the likes of the New York Post and NBC. Her reasoning may seem nonsensical to most of us, but Dafna seems to have made the best out of her five minutes of internet fame by posting through the backlash. Us terminally online generations are nothing if not resourceful.

That's it for another week. Here's to another arbitrary measure of time where people do and talk about the wildest things online. The internet rarely disappoints. Until next time!