Why is Literally Everyone on Twitter Tweeting About Carp? And Whose Carp is That? WHAT’S HAPPENING?

Tommy ChristopherDec 19th, 2020, 8:45 am
 

Photo by Thirdman from Pexels

Some questions are better left unanswered, but the takeover of Twitter by carp is too confounding to ignore — as evidence by the zillions of carp tweets that have flooded social media over the past 12 hours or so.

There is a LOT of chatter on Twitter about carp, much of it now centered on figuring out why everyone is tweeting about carp, which might make you wonder if some coincidental concentration of organic tweets about carp created a trend that propelled a self-sustaining quest to learn why everyone is tweeting about carp, the answer to which is that everyone wants to know why everyone is tweeting about carp. It would be the perfect 2020 solution to the mystery.

But no. What had happened was a Twitter user posted a tweet featuring a photo of a large carp and the message “carp” — along with an enticing button that said “Tweet #carp”.

Without even knowing if that button would result in the death of some random person somewhere else in the world, people began pressing it, and discovering that it automatically created a carp-themed retweet.

About half an hour later, user dm4uz3 gave the tweet a push by promoting it:

The trend exploded, as Know Your Meme notes:

Shortly after, dm4uz3 promoted the tweet, causing a chain reaction of retweets.[3] Carp received 170k tweets in one hour.

And so the question “What’s up with this carp thing?” was born, adding to the virality of the phenomenon. It even reached the United States Senate.

The tweet was created using a viral marketing tool, as several Twitter users explained.

The photo appears to have been taken from a Twitter conversation several days earlier.

And that photo appears to be one taken by fishing enthusiast Tom Schlichter, and posted to his blog, appropriately enough, on April 1, 2016. It’s a harrowing first-person account of how he landed the 25 pounder on the Peconic River. Spoiler alert: the mammoth quarry was released, no worse for the wear according to Schlichter, and is now immortal.

Now let me tell you why The Mandalorian is trending…

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