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01
Baby Coppola Makes Vodka Sauce
In March, Romy Croquet, the 16-year-old daughter of two legends (Sofia Coppola and Thomas Mars), went viral on TikTok, but mainly on Twitter. She started her viral video with a bang, claiming she was grounded for trying to charter a helicopter on her dad's credit card so she could fly from New York to Maryland because she wanted to have dinner with her camp friend. Usually, such blatant spoiled rich kid behavior would be torn apart by Twitter users, but miraculously, she was labeled an iconic Nepo Baby for the ages.
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02
Legacy Verification Ends
Twitter verification is among the few things the Bird website ever did right. People try to impersonate celebrities online constantly, and verification used to be an easy way to ensure someone was who they said they were. Unfortunately, Elon Musk wanted to tear down the few undeniably good things about Twitter. After launching Twitter Blue last December, in which regular people could pay for blue checks, it was clear it was a flawed system, because you could still tell the difference between an account that paid for Twitter and one that was verified before Twitter Blue was invented. That just wouldn't do for Elon, so in April, he did away with legacy verification once and for all.
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03
Yeonmi Park Tells All
Yeonmi Park is an activist and a North Korean defector who fled to China in 2007 before settling in South Korea and later the United States. She's built a career by telling stories about her life in North Korea, many of which are so harrowing they're hard to believe. This May, a clip of her claiming North Korean children are forced to "eat mud" went viral. From that, she gained a reputation for telling blatant lies to accelerate her career. Hence, this image of her on The Joe Rogan Podcast became the perfect meme format for making fun of liars.
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04
I AM A SURGEON, DR. HAN
Internet stars were not the only ones making waves on Twitter this year. Network TV still has meme potential beyond everyone taking the piss out of Young Sheldon, and no show demonstrated that better this year than The Good Doctor. The Good Doctor follows a young autistic savant as he makes his way through the trials and tribulations of surgical residency. From its description, it sounds like a normal show, but the baffling performance from its lead actor, who is not autistic, made the show the subject of Twitter mockery for one glorious day. The titular doctor screams at his prejudiced advisor, Dr. Han, insisting, "I AM A SURGEON, DR. HAN," and if you knew nothing about the context of the show, it was a hilarious viewing experience.
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05
Colleen Ballinger Apology Goes Horribly Wrong
Colleen Ballinger is a YouTuber better known for her comedy persona, Miranda Sings. In the mid-2010s, she was an internet superstar, donning excessive amounts of red lipstick and intentionally singing terribly, charming tweens across the nation. Earlier this year, she was accused of sending messages of a sexual nature in group chats with underaged fans. Mind you, this is a woman in her mid-thirties texting with teens who stan her. In June 2023, she released an "apology" video, where she claimed she wasn't a groomer through song. As expected, Twitter had a field day with this non-apology, tainting her reputation for at least the near future.
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06
Pacino vs. De Niro; Hotness Edition
What is Twitter without some good old-fashioned polls? Culture writer Ashley Reese went viral this spring after posing a very simple question: Who's hotter: Young Al Pacino or Young Robert De Niro? Throughout the whole 24-hour period, the poll was up, and people were wholly divided. Fans got nasty in the comments, sharing pictures of their fave in a desperate attempt to prove he was the hotter Academy Award winner. Ultimately, with 277,372 votes counted, De Niro came out on top.
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07
Twitter Becomes 'X'
This is the moment you've all been waiting for. You can gloriously rub in my face that, "It's not Twitter anymore! It's X!" When I tell you I've heard that joke a thousand times, and it has been funny zero of those times, I truly mean that. On July 23rd, Elon Musk decided it would be a good idea to eliminate the iconic branding that's defined Twitter for nearly two decades and replace it with something more similar to a corn website. I still can't believe this wasn't one of Elon's two-day-long experiments that he immediately reneged on after everyone hated it.
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08
Donald Trump's Mugshot
It is a rare occurrence that one can see a meme coming from a mile away. It's even rarer that you can predict a meme before the image that makes up the meme has even come out. This was one of those occurrences. On Wednesday, August 24th, extremely reliable news sources like Pop Crave, Pop Base, and Pop Tingz reported that Donald Trump's mugshot would be released on August 25th. Twitter users sat around in anticipation, waiting for the soon-to-be iconic image to emerge. Some fake mugshots surfaced and started circulating, but they were quickly debunked. Finally, the actual mugshot came out around 8 PM Eastern Standard Time. It was precisely what everyone expected, and the meme makers got a-cooking.
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09
Boston Cop Falls Down Slide
Great slapstick physical comedy is hard to come by these days, but when it does, it's usually intentional. Now that once beloved cultural institutions like America's Funniest Home Videos have all but evaporated from popular culture, we rely on platforms like Twitter to show us the most iconic videos of people falling and making fools of themselves. I could say more, but this video of a cop tumbling down a playground slide in Boston speaks for itself.
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10
Travis Kelce's Old Tweets Resurface
Usually, when somebody's old tweets get attention, it's not because they were super hilarious and wholesome. It usually is the beginning of a cancellation campaign, but Travis Kelce is not your ordinary Twitter user. His old tweets from 2009-2012 were recirculated online in November, and they range from prophetic to inane to extremely relatable. Most of them were tweeted during the time when he played college football for the Cincinnati Bearcats, where he could've never known he'd one day cinch two Super Bowl titles, the date the most famous person who was also born in 1989, and become a meme all in less than 5 years.
Top 10 Twitter Moments of the Year (2023)
Twitter memes come and go so quickly. We laugh and hoot and holler at a "Twitter main character" for approximately 48 hours and proceed to forget they ever existed. Well, I don't want to forget! The internet is already so poorly archived that it's important to document phenomena outside of the platform where it first originated. That's why I'm proud to present the most iconic moments on Twitter from the past year. These tweets will surely live on in our memories far beyond December of 2023 and are a testament to the persistence of the social media platform everybody loves to hate.
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