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10 People Who Were Trending For No Reason

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All it took was a red sweater, a Chewbacca mask, and one earnest debate question to turn total strangers into household names overnight.

TheThings Celebrity’s countdown “10 People Who Went Viral Online” — also billed as “10 People Who Were Trending For No Reason” — rounds up the ordinary folks who briefly ran the internet without ever throwing a punch, hitting a home run, or releasing an album. No talent required; just a strange photo, a funny catchphrase, or a webcam left rolling at the wrong (or right) moment. The video walks through how each of these people got swept into flashbulb fame and, just as fast, watched it fade.

• Ken Bone became an instant pop-culture fixture after asking an energy-policy question in a red quarter-zip sweater during the October 2016 presidential town hall debate.
• Candace Payne’s “Chewbacca Mask Lady” Facebook Live video — just her laughing hysterically in a toy mask — became the single most-viewed Facebook Live stream of 2016.
• Danielle Bregoli’s “Cash Me Ousside” line, delivered during a September 2016 appearance on Dr. Phil, turned a teenage guest into a full-blown internet sensation almost immediately.

The Undecided Voter Who Broke the Internet

Ken Bone didn’t say anything outrageous. That was the joke. Standing at the mic during the second 2016 presidential debate, he asked a straightforward question about balancing the country’s current energy infrastructure with newer, cleaner technology.

“How can we address the physical plant needs of the current energy industry while at the same time considering and encouraging progress and development in newer, greener technologies?”

That was it — a mustache, a bright red sweater, and a genuinely dull policy question — and Twitter ran with it for days. Bone landed an Uber commercial off the buzz, made the media rounds, and then, just as quickly, went back to his life outside the spotlight. The whole arc is a tidy case study in how a single unremarkable moment on live television, the kind covered elsewhere in pieces like inappropriate things politicians said on live TV, can eclipse the actual news of the night.

From Retail Cashier to Overnight Heartthrob

Alex Lee was just bagging groceries at a Target register in 2014 when a customer’s photo of him hit Twitter and detonated. “Alex from Target” trended worldwide within hours, landed him television interviews, and briefly made a teenage cashier one of the most talked-about faces on the internet — for no reason beyond a candid photo and good lighting. Within weeks, the attention moved on and Lee went back to an ordinary life, one of the fastest rise-and-fade cycles the countdown covers.

Catchphrases and Clips That Took Over Timelines

Some of the video’s subjects didn’t even need a full sentence to go viral. The “Damn, Daniel” videos — just a friend repeatedly hyping up a teenager’s white Vans — racked up millions of views in 2016 and landed the pair talk-show bookings. Jacob Sartorius built a similar wave of attention on musical.ly with lip-sync clips, parlaying his young fanbase into a record deal, in the same viral-clip tradition explored in pieces like performers who were caught lip syncing on live TV. Left Shark turned an off-beat dance move during Katy Perry’s Super Bowl XLIX halftime show into an instant meme, and Salt Bae’s theatrical seasoning technique — filmed at his own steakhouse — spun into one of the most-repeated gestures on social media in early 2017.

Viral Media Divides Online Audiences

Not every entry needed a joke to catch fire — some just needed an argument. “The Dress” set off a genuine color-perception debate in 2015 that split households and newsrooms over whether a photographed dress was blue-and-black or white-and-gold. Arshad Khan, a tea vendor photographed on the job in Islamabad, went viral purely off his looks and picked up modeling offers almost overnight. And Candace Payne’s Chewbacca mask video proved that pure, unfiltered joy on camera could outperform anything scripted — her Facebook Live clip became the platform’s most-watched livestream of the entire year.

Fame built this way rarely survives contact with a normal week. Bone went back to Indiana, Lee went back to retail, and the “Damn, Daniel” kid stopped trending the second a newer clip took his spot — which is really the only consistent rule the whole genre, and the kind of overnight-collapse story detailed in pieces like reporters who ruined their careers on social media, keeps proving over and over.