So Skibidi: How Online Were You In October?

World Wide War: As war rages between Israel and Hamas, a different kind of battle is happening online. From New York Times misinformation to Israel tweeting about BetterHelp to influencers posting about their personal hardships while wearing designer sunglasses, it’s hard to say who’s winning, but we as a society have definitely lost.

Influencers, Infested: A 65 percent increase in pest-control visits across France this year means tourists are bringing back more than just memories. Videos reporting sightings of bedbugs crawling Paris’s metro, hotels, and movie theaters contributed to widespread paranoia as influencers waged their own kind of infestation on Paris Fashion Week.

You Can’t Clip With Us: In celebration of Mean Girls on October 3,, Paramount created a dedicated Mean Girls TikTok page that, for one brief day, hosted the entire 2004 movie across 23 clips. It was a (short-lived) nod to a kind of streaming piracy popularized on TikTok, recently emulated by other networks like Peacock. They’re not a regular network — they’re a cool network!

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Oyster overload

There are two ways of handling overly persistent men in your DMs: Ignore them, or make them sorry they ever laid eyes on you. TikTok creator @equanaaa chose the latter. In an October 11 video, the creator had her date meet her at Atlanta restaurant Fontaine’s for Oyster Tuesday, where patrons can buy a dozen oysters for $15. Or, if you’re Equana B, 48 oysters for $60. In her viral TikTok video, viewers watched her slurp and smack serving after serving of oysters, seemingly without any help from her date, before moving on to order an additional plate of potatoes and crab cakes. The date ultimately ran out on the bill under the guise of going to the bathroom and never returning, and while commenters proceeded to debate the ethics of the situation, I think it’s high time for men who fuck around in the DMs to finally find out.

Why It’s a 2: The TikTok video received over 5 million views and became a meme on Twitter, earning Equana’s stunt write-ups in places like the New York Post, Today, Fox, Rolling Stone, and USA Today, until it reached the man she would go on to order crawfish from a week later.

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Pod-crashed

On October 12, 2023, Rolling Stone published a report containing allegations of physical abuse and inappropriate behavior with fans against now-former Last Podcast on the Left co-host Ben Kissel. The investigation came after an August 2023 post from Kissel’s former partner Taylor Moon, who alluded to their split by reportedly writing, “You’ll never get to drunkenly pin me to the bed and call me a pathetic fucking loser or stupid fucking bitch ever again.� Moon’s Instagram has since been deleted. In response, co-hosts Henry Zebrowski and Marcus Parks announced in a September 13 episode that Kissel would be returning to the podcast after going into treatment for his “mental health and physical health,� only to announce in an October 5 post that Kissel would be leaving the network entirely.

Why It’s a 2: The Last Podcast on the Left launched in 2011 and was among the early true-crime-comedy podcasts on the market. It went on to accrue over a billion listens, Rolling Stone writes, and expanded into a podcast network of 14 shows, earning its popularity in part thanks to its respectful treatment of victims in the hosts’ discussions of true crime and abuse. The allegations against Kissel have given way to a larger uncertainty about what those at the true-crime podcast knew about his alleged behavior and whether red flags were overlooked.

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Ignorance at the Altar

Well, that’s the “something old� covered. Lunden Stallings and Oliva Bennett earned their almost 700,000 TikTok followers for, essentially, being a preppy lesbian couple who live in Georgia, but things took a turn on October 1. While the two were tying the knot, Reddit was digging up a series of racist and derogatory tweets allegedly posted by Lunden a decade prior. Lunden’s account, as well as the Reddit posts, were wiped from the internet shortly after, but the damage had been done. The pair addressed the tweets in a TikTok story on October 3, which earned them more backlash for acknowledging the controversy only in a post that would later disappear. After all this, you’d think they would have realized that, no matter how hard they try, the internet is forever.

Why It’s a 2: Lunden and Olivia Stallings sit at a very specific influencer intersection: popular enough for people to go digging through their old tweets, but unknown enough that these bad tweets will be the reason so many more people hear about them.

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Artificial Influencer

This month, Meta began rolling out its first AI chatbots, based on the likenesses of popular celebrity personalities like Snoop Dogg, Kendall Jenner, and TikTok creator Charli D’Amelio. Instead of playing themselves, however, these figures embody fictional characters with their own social profiles, specializing in different topics and types of conversations. Amber, played by Paris Hilton, is there to solve mysteries, and Zach, played by MrBeast, is a “big brother who will roast you — because he cares.� You can interact with these chatbots over Messenger, where video of the character reacting in real time is displayed above the conversation and they all look about as uncomfortable as you do.

Why It’s a 2: After stumbling through the Metaverse, Meta is trying a new angle of dystopia, this time seemingly geared toward the teenagers who remain allergic to the platform. It’s too soon to say if this tactic will work, but it’s only a matter of time before TikTok launches a competitor.

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Babish Support Group

After speculation among Binging With Babish fans about the You Tube channel’s declining views, creator Andrew Rea, who goes by the pseudonym “Babish,� came forward on Reddit with an explanation. The channel, which re-creates foods seen in famous movies and TV shows, began posting content in 2016 and gradually expanded into the larger Babish Culinary Universe of guest chefs and content. Starting in 2022, however, Rea revealed he was having a difficult time behind the scenes, culminating in a mental-health incident that landed him in a hospital where he was sexually assaulted.

In the time since, while he received care in a rehab facility, he has said he also split from his wife, Babish Culinary Universe producer Jess Opon.

“I’m not even sure if this post is the right thing to do — but after seeing those endless comments postulating as to why I’ve stopped caring or lost my passion, I felt the need for some emotional transparency,� Rea wrote in the October 4 Reddit post. “The channel has obviously changed — new shows, new faces — but I won’t deny that I’ve been too frightened to take creative risks. My hope is that by being a bit more open and honest about my personal life, some walls might come down, and I’ll feel even a little more comfortable with being myself again.�

Why It’s a 3: The Babish Culinary Universe channel boasts 10 million subscribers and a dedicated fan base that will be seeing Rea on his upcoming tour for his second cookbook. Even though the news didn’t make mainstream headlines, his vulnerable post was significant to the channel’s community.

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Djerf vs. Dupes

Taking down small creators? That’s not very Scandinavian-clean-girl-tomato-girl-summer of you — or whatever it is we’re now calling Matilda Djerf’s vibe. Djerf, a 26-year-old fashion designer from Sweden who turned her online aesthetic into a clothing brand of big blazers and drapey jeans called Djerf Avenue, found herself in the middle of a rare controversy when she and her team began flagging videos from creators on TikTok they believed to be promoting cheaper alternatives to her clothing. In a statement on Instagram, the Djerf team positioned this as cracking down on copyright infringement. However, patterned pajamas and knit sweaters long predate Djerf’s company, and many saw this as Djerf unreasonably targeting small creators.

Why It’s a 3: Djerf has over 3 million followers on Instagram and an occasionally active YouTube channel, but since 2019 her main focus has been Djerf Avenue, a multimillion-dollar endeavor that got a write-up in the New York Times last year. However, this particular controversy has stayed mostly within the creator industry: the people bearing the brunt of Djerf’s overzealous policing.

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Baby Makes … 10

Hannah Neeleman is a woman invented by your nightmares to ensure you always feel inadequate. She’s a ballerina dancer turned homesteader. She competes in beauty pageants while pregnant. She’s married to a JetBlue heir and boasts over 6 million Instagram followers under the moniker Ballerina Farm, where she shares aesthetically pleasing glimpses of her family’s Little House on the Prairie cosplay and graphic updates about cooking and eating the rooster that attacked her child. But on October 16, she topped even that by announcing she was pregnant with baby No. 8, bringing the Ballerina Farm family to a population of ten.

Why It’s a 3: This is big news in the mommy blogosphere because (1) baby eight and (2) Hannah’s whole thing thrives on her ability to make motherhood and domesticity look not just easy but downright tranquil. Adding yet another baby to the mix feels like the performance reaching an impossible new height, a bewildering development that no one outside of her aghast followers seems to care about.

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Undercover Keith

The restaurants of Atlanta have a new motto: Live every day like Keith Lee just ordered from your menu. The 27-year-old restaurant critic and mixed martial artist took a trip to the city in the final week of October and accidentally ended up exposing the convoluted rules and exclusivity running rampant in Atlanta’s dining scene. For instance, in a video reviewing a meal from Atlanta Breakfast Club, Lee shared that the waitress was not allowed to take any orders until the entire party had sat down and that they would not be allowed to add anything to their order after it had been placed. Plus, butter was $1. But that’s a walk in the park compared to what happened at the Real Milk & Honey, which turned away Lee’s family only for Lee himself to make an appearance, prompting it to change its tune. However, Lee refused the special treatment and took the story to TikTok.

Why It’s a 3: Over 19 million people watched Lee’s Real Milk & Honey experience, which validated a growing frustration among Atlanta patrons that restaurants have adopted a clublike way of operating, making it extremely difficult to eat at them. The Real Milk & Honey responded with a tongue-in-cheek video, and if you want to know how that went over, just take a look at its recent Yelp reviews.

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Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Slay

Loving Harry Potter is a millennial sin, but just add a beat and Gen Z is happy to get onboard. An account dedicated to the promotion of Frever, a Swedish app for creating and making content with custom avatars, ended up catapulting a song by Australian music producer Zēo to virality. Known simply as “Harry Potter Chess Scene Remix,� the song riffs on dialogue from the end of the Sorcerer’s Stone movie, in which Harry, Ron, and Hermione negotiate a game of life-size wizard chess. With a bit of Autotune and an irresistible drop, the tense scene became a verified banger that other creators began using for their own, non-CGI dance videos.

Why It’s a 4: While the initial video has 6 million views and commenters begging for a version on Spotify, the sound itself has only been used in just over 2,600 videos, meaning we’re all on the same very specific For You Page.

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Suspicious sniffles

When it comes to doing drugs, there’s only one thing more obvious than a bunch of people piling into the same bar bathroom, and that’s doing it just out of the frame on TikTok Live. Because of this, no one can say for certain that’s what Jeffree Star was up to in a widely circulated clip from an October 14 livestream, but how else do you explain his pulling something out of his pocket, ducking out of view of the camera, and afterward wiping his nose? Allergies, says Star in the clip.

Showing recreational drug use is not allowed on TikTok, which, I guess, give or take an inch, is not what happened; hence Star’s account still being alive and well. The brazenness of it all has prompted lots of speculation on Reddit, but if Star could survive multiple Dramageddons, then he can survive this.

Why It’s a 4: Speaking of Dramageddon, though Star did come out the other side with a semblance of a career intact, he has fallen out of the Zeitgeist. While Jeffree Star Cosmetics is still operating, the creator rarely posts on YouTube anymore, which is curious, since I’d imagine he definitely has the energy for it …

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Skibidi-doo-dah

The Gen Alpha memes are here, and they are somehow even more indecipherable than “cheugy.� On October 2, TikTok user @ovp.9 uploaded a video featuring audio of what, at first listen, is a child rambling singsong nonsense words. However, the lyrics “Sticking out your gyat for the rizzler / You’re so skibidi / You’re so fanum tax� unfortunately mean something. “Gyat� is a term used for a woman with a curvy body, and a “rizzler� is someone with “rizz,� meaning they’re good at seduction. “Skibidi� is a viral song, and “fanum tax� is pulled from a Kai Cenat video in which fellow streamer Fanum stole a bite of Cenat’s cookies, referred to as taking a “tax.� All together, however, these lyrics might as well be Simlish, which makes it extra-irritating for the song to have gotten stuck in so many people’s heads, inspiring multiple remixes.

Why It’s a 4: Give it a few more years, and Gen Alpha memes will start to become relevant. Now, however, they’re simply a terrifying harbinger of what’s to come online.

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First Person

Back in July, Jon Romano went viral on TikTok for identifying himself as the perpetrator of a 2004 nonfatal school shooting. He was sixteen at the time and served seventeen years in prison before his release in 2020. Since 2004, school shootings have only become more common, with 106 incidents of gunfire on school grounds in 2023 alone — so it’s not surprising that his admission on TikTok was received poorly. However, he’s continued posting as recently as October 5, with police footage in an attempt to clarify his motives and help prevent further school shootings by sharing his unique perspective.

Why It’s a 4: While a number of Romano’s videos have received a million views, this is a subject far too nuanced for TikTok. His initial videos may have appeared on feeds, but for the most part, the TikTok community is giving him a wide berth.

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Jack of All Names

Halloween is all about ghosts and goblins, but Lewis is a new entry into the canon. This Target decoration is an eight-foot-tall “Pumpkin Ghoul� that, as anyone who’s heard the most iconic of his six automated phrases knows, is not a jack-o’-lantern. His name is Lewis. Lewis got popular on TikTok for his goofy catchphrase with people filming themselves terrorizing him at the store and even creating slutty Halloween costumes based on his likeness.

Why It’s a 5: Lewis is popular enough to have sold out on Target’s website, but it’s likely entirely a TikTok inside joke. It appears some Targets had to take away Lewis’s button for the sake of employee sanity, which is a violent desecration of pumpkin rights. Were you silent, Lewis, or were you silenced?

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“It�-girl Problems

With most of social media arguing about geopolitics, benign book discourse is a breath of fresh air. On October 24, Nylon published a piece about the concept of a “literary it girl,� and people were super-normal about it. By that, I mean they took it personally that some authors were choosing to celebrate the launch of their books with parties and custom merch. The main point detractors made was that it’s not clear any of these glitzy efforts translate into sales, but if you had a company willing to make a custom perfume in honor of your latest book, I’m certain you’d do the same.

Why It’s a 5: This sooooo doesn’t matter, which means people spent waaaaay too much of their time debating it. One of those rare days when X briefly felt like old Twitter.

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Character Consent

Speaking of old Twitter, I can’t think of anything more classic than someone doing a backbend to make the case for an argument as meaningless as “Fictional sex is coercion because the characters don’t have agency.� According to user @thecolorhannah, who took the initial screenshot a year ago and sent it to her friend, this conversation took place in the context of fan fiction. However, on October 8, user @Swilua posted it on her account, and it took off.

“This child has never even SEEN grass,� one quote tweet reads.

Why It’s a 5: Just read the tweet again, know this is a real debate in the fan-fiction community, and move on with your one precious life.