I was on Twitter between 2009 and 2025 and in all that time I went viral twice. I have literally no idea why either of these blew up, but I thought it might be amusing to keep them in one place for posterity. Here’s the first one:
Before I deleted my account, this had been seen by over 2 million Twitter users. Mad. Anyway, here are a couple of blog posts about how it happened.
And here’s the second one, which as far as I can tell was largely ignored in the UK – at least at first – but somehow went big in Latin America:
Only 400000 users saw this one, so it never quite caught up with its crypto chum. Still crazy, though. And in answer to your inevitable question, yes I did get a few more subscribers to my podcast as a result and I also think there was a hint of an uptick in sales of at least three of my books.
The weirdest thing about it was the way it kept ticking over all through Sunday July 11th, right up until the Euros 2020 penalty shoot-out, when it temporarily stopped being retweeted or liked, and it came to a grinding halt. Just like any virus, really.
This next one didn’t actually go viral, but it did get mentioned in the Indy100 list of 13 of the best memes about Tory MPs submitting no confidence letters to Sir Graham Brady. I actually did a whole sequence of these but for some reason failed to thread them properly. Never mind.
