There’s a lot happening on social media, more than any one person can safely keep up with. Do you need to know about it? At Hall Monitor, we provide you with a digest to help you make up your mind.
TikTok Announcement: Plumbing and You
French TikToker and YouTuber Cyril Schreiner recently went viral with an elaborate, multi-part comédie d’erreurs concerning the disposal of bathtub full of Orbeez. Orbeez, you may recall, are absorbent polymer beads that engorge to the size of marbles when wet and definitely should not be poured down the drain.
The incident yielded over 40 million total views for Schreiner, and, if you believe him, a municipal sewage crisis, a smoking vacuum cleaner, an Orbeez-jammed storm drain, and a geyser of brown discharge. “JE SUIS DANS LA MERDE,” he captioned a video of a neighbor holding a dirt clod with Orbeez inside. “OMG ÉCOUTER JE SUIS DANS LA MERDE!!” he captioned a confrontation with a local investigator. “Zut!” he exclaimed, French-ly, throughout. One YouTube commenter helpfully suggested that he manually scoop the balls from the toilet into a trash bag.
Buuut since it’s the hall monitor’s unfortunate duty to kill all fun, here’s a debunker from local public broadcaster France Bleu Normandie. According to France Bleu, the mayor of Schreiner’s village said that the sewage backup depicted in the videos would be “impossible,” since the town has no collective sanitation network. Other than several annoying phone calls and emails (thanks to Schreiner’s use of the town logo in a supposed civil notice), the mayor told the outlet that no harm had been done and no repercussions will take place. Schreiner did not respond to France Bleu’s request for comment.
What we do know is that Orbeez grow when submerged in the bathtub, Schreiner put them there, and that, whether it was all a ruse or not, he fucked up a bathroom in the process.
Sentence: One hour of detention per marble—in other words, infinite detention. Plus one additional warning from Sonic the Hedgehog’s Twitter account.
Last week, a TikTok video purportedly showing a cheerful trip to an abortion clinic set the internet’s take machines on fire. The video has since been removed, but right-wing media remains at DEFCON 1.
In case you missed it, the clip opened with the banner “Abortion time! TAKE 2,” showing a girl exposing a protruding belly and an ensuing (very giggly) trip to Planned Parenthood. Flash forward to a waiting room and then a medical examination room, where the camera lingered momentarily on an ultrasound monitor.
The video ended there, but The Federalist thinks it should have shown vomiting and sobbing. Reporter Taylor Lorenz, on the other hand, celebrated the creators’ candor. The TikTok account has since been deactivated. (An anti-choice activist took some credit for that.) What actually happened remains unclear, but people will likely keep weighing in on it forever.
Sentence: Just keep us out of this, thanks.
Twitch gamer xQc is back at work, dusting off a three-day ban imposed after he streamed the nudity-filled video game “Strip 4: Classmate Study”—a Connect Four-themed version of strip poker. CCN (formerly “CryptoCoinsNews.com”) speculates that xQc, well aware of Twitch’s community guidelines, may have wanted a vacation from streaming without losing media attention. If only a humble hall monitor could look at porn on duty and get sick leave.
Sentence: Added to his permanent record.
Community News
For Super Tuesday, New York-based creative agency Highfield assembled an army of 12 to take over the “tagged” pages of the 50 most-followed celebrities on Instagram with Bernie Sanders banners. (This entailed uploading the banner as a series of photos and then furiously tagging celebrities in them.) As Highfield co-founder Matthew Gardner told Gizmodo in a phone call yesterday, Kim Kardashian proved especially tough to take over since she’s tagged like 12 times a minute, but Drake is an easier mark:
“Bloomberg bought his support on the internet, and we’re trying to prove that Bernie doesn’t have to,” Gardner told us. He added that “until Bloomberg drops out, we’ll happily support Bernie for free.”
It seems, then, that their work here is done.
News From Abroad
The UK Home Office has trumpeted the glorious return of “iconic” blue passports in post-Brexit Britain. The Britons of Twitter are unimpressed.
Injury Report
- A high school student in Baltimore County was reportedly harmed in another “skull breaker” incident, the TikTok trend where two people kick the legs out from under another person mid-jump. The Baltimore County Public School department provided no details on the extent of the injury but issued a community warning. [WMAR 2 News]
- The Washington Post counts several other cases in New Jersey, Alabama, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Arkansas. [The Washington Post]
Be Safe!
The World Health Organization is on TikTok with in-flight safety-styled instructions on coronavirus precautions. They are appropriately boring and informative.