This Is How It Feels to Go Viral on Twitter
Imagine you’re at a party, chatting with people. Most you met there, while a few you met before you arrived. You make a comment. People nod enthusiastically, maybe laugh. Some reply. Then the walls surrounding the party crack and tumble away, revealing thousands, even millions of people. You look down and realize you’re wearing a mic. They all heard what you said.
Buckle up. You’ve gone viral.
I’ve had two tweets go — and this is the only way I can describe it — horribly viral. The first was in November 2017, after the Sutherland Springs shooting. I was extremely upset by the news, furious that politicians with the power to implement gun control laws just “sent thoughts and prayers,” using the language of empathy to look noble while doing nothing. So I tweeted to my roughly 2,500 followers:
It would be liked 114,000 times and retweeted 46,000 times as of early April.
The second time was in March 2019, in response to the news that New Zealand was moving to ban semi-automatic weapons one day after the Christchurch shooting. All I did was retweet the news, with the joke:
It being so similar to the first tweet, maybe I should have suspected this one would go viral too — which it did, with even more likes than the first. What I wouldn’t have suspected is how similar the experiences were.
So, if you go viral, I think I can give you an idea of what to expect.
Up until this point, a good tweet of mine would get maybe 10 likes, perhaps a retweet or two. When my tweet on guns notched up 70 likes, I said, “Gosh!” When it reached the high hundreds, I said to myself, “Surely it’ll stop soon.” When it made the thousands, I shivered inside with a feeling I recognized from the times I did theater and stand-up comedy: stage fright. As it broke 100,000, I put my phone away.
Of course it’s a form of validation — there’s a reason the like button is shaped like a heart and not a rotten tomato. But the first time the like button on your tweet is pressed by six figures of thumbs, I bet you’ll shiver too.
What counts as having “control” over a tweet? Well, you have the power to delete it, and you can monitor the numbers on it. But by the time a tweet has gone truly viral, it’s too late. I hope you picked a decent profile pic, because you are now a meme.
You will see your face plastered all over Reddit, Instagram, and Facebook, courtesy of your excited friends who report the tweet’s whereabouts to you like a team of private investigators you haven’t hired. They’ll send you feverish messages: “You’re the top post on Reddit!” “January Jones just shared your tweet!” “Ruby Rose just shared your tweet!” They’ll probably assume this will delight you, and maybe it will at first. But there’s also fear and dread — or whatever emotions you associate with an enormous amount of attention over which you have precisely zero control.
You’re going to hear from people you know. They’ll get in touch for three reasons:
Strangers get in touch for three reasons:
The strangest element of going viral is people reacting like your tweet was some kind of Jehovah’s Witness–style knock on their door. It’s as if they feel they were minding their own business while you barged into their life with your opinion, when one look at your “requests” inbox shows that the truth is the other way around. If people could go viral on purpose, everyone would be doing it.
When your words are being seen by millions, people imagine you as someone with power and influence, rather than just some woman in her kitchen, trying to reach a bowl as the kettle boils. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not complaining. This is the small print of social media. If you don’t want the chance of going viral, don’t tweet. But still, the questions you get about the experience are bizarre. In an interview for a book, I was asked, “Why didn’t you word your tweet in a way that would please everyone?” I decided not to say, “Um… how would one do that?” and instead explained that I didn’t go viral on purpose. I tweeted into my echo chamber, as I always do — and then one day, the walls fell down.
The most mature course of action, and also the hardest, is to step away from social media. The noise of all those voices is deafening, but so is the silence when you switch it off. Read a book, watch an episode of something hilarious, eat cake, temporarily ditch your avatar friends and talk to a face made of flesh. Appreciate the quiet of not having random people from all over the world strolling into your day with unsolicited feedback.
I worked out much too late that Twitter’s advanced filters are your friend. Part of the stress of going viral is the noise of your mentions going wild. Your tweet already has six figures of likes — do you really need to see the next 20 people who like it? I’d already muted notifications from anyone with a default profile photo and anyone who hadn’t confirmed their phone number or email address (people who want to remain anonymous, basically), but muting notifications from anyone who didn’t follow me quieted things right down. It also meant I’d have to deliberately click on a tweet and scroll down through the replies if I wanted to be told how stupid I am.
One more thing: Your words reached people across the world. You can feel good about it for a little while. Then go back to your life. And be nice to whoever’s next.
And get ready for Day Five, when…
Probably the most important thing to remember when going viral is not to get addicted to the attention or let it validate you, because after a few days it’s withdrawn, pretty much all at once. By day five, you probably have a lot more followers, and maybe you see a bit more engagement on your tweets than before. But for now, the mic has been turned off, and things go, really startlingly, back to normal.
Because nobody remembers what anyone tweeted last week.
This Is How It Feels to Go Viral on Twitter
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