Fictional Day, 7:05 AM: My fourth and final alarm goes off and the ghastly sound sends a conditioned shockwave of dread and doom throughout my anxiety-ridden, sleep-deprived body. From the top: I hate the sound of alarms. I have anxiety. I don’t get enough sleep. Do you feel attacked? Was that overly relatable? Well guess what the fuck I did next, you genetically-identical, pasture-grazing sheep? I immediately grabbed for my phone and opened Twitter, which I jokingly refer to as my “morning newspaper.” It never gets any chuckles. But it’s worth thousands of retweets from a gaggle of like-minded silly geese on Twitter, and that’s infinitely more valuable than authentic human reactions. Now that I have the attention of the demographic I’m trying to simultaneously target and trash, let’s talk about social media trends.

Warning: This blog is about Twitter. If you don’t actively use it or, for that matter, have an unhealthy love/hate obsession with it, then this probably isn’t for you.

While I was finishing up my morning exercise routine of strolling through Twitter [pauses while studio audience erupts in laughter] I found myself experiencing nightmarish levels of déjà vu that rivaled the plot of Denzel Washington’s most mediocre film. Amongst tear-inducing “don’t say it don’t say it don’t say it” jokes, No Nut November nuances, and always-tempting “More for Sagittarius” links, I caught a glimpse of what appeared to be some old foes from yesteryear. Vaguely familiar but unquestionably punchable faces above vaguely familiar quote tweets that had bizarre amounts of retweets and likes. It could only mean one thing.

Tweetdeckers are back.

For those of you with social lives or meaningful relationships with other humans, “tweetdeckers” is a colloquial term used to describe the contingent of jaw-clenching, young adult men on Twitter who employ advanced entrepreneurial tactics to make their stolen tweets go insanely fucking viral.

They’re the mirrorsexual, former JV shortstops and current Make-A-Wish Pac Sun models who assault timelines on a daily basis with recycled viral “jokes” that do Obama(Ellen x Ariana) numbers. Honestly, it’s kind of commendable. If you’re the type of person to commend a pedophile for getting national TV time on To Catch A Predator.

Like a squadron of narcissistic, racially-ambiguous leprechauns, these whippersnappers seem to have stumbled upon a pot of old viral tweets worth millions of likes and retweets. And all they have to do is utilize the copy and paste functions on their keyboard to cash in on an abundance of quantifiable validation points, which, in turn, boosts their self-perceived online fame and inter-net worth. Except, the brilliant minds of business-savvy cyber pirates like Lowkey Nerdy OG and Boujee Slut follow a more complex strategy of stealing reenacting historical quote tweets. Mr. OG and Mr. Slut go above and beyond the basic maneuvers of simple-minded Deck Boys and follow an avant-garde 4 step process of tweet thievery:

1. Find a viral tweet from 6+ months ago

2. Create an entirely new, anonymous “alley oop” account like @lipcum

3. Use Miss Cum to recreate the original quoted tweet

4. Put the cherry on top of your inevitably viral sundae

It’s fairly simple if you hate yourself enough to give it a try, and it’s much more reputable than the alternative method of digging up tweets from the pre-Trump era just to revive unoriginal puns:

467 THOUSAND likes for a 5 word joke, though. That’s an accomplishment straight out of @FrancisBarstool’s wettest dreams.

With an increasingly growing tolerance for social media attention, some of these young men are finding that simply stealing individual tweets isn’t getting them high anymore, and they’ve moved on to stealing entire threads:

What’s next? Stealing someone’s entire twitter feed? Stealing someone’s entire identity and feeling their innermost wants and desires?

Deck The Halls

Researching these guys was like researching the different subcategories of herpes. They all looked the same, they were all viral, and they were all preventing people from having sex (because they were stealing so many girls).

Never mind the spine-chilling douchiness and ethanol-producing corniness of these picture+bio combinations—why the fuck do all these guys look like the EXACT same person at varying stages of the hotness evolution process? It actually might be worthy of a conspiracy theory, but I’ll save that for someone who’s an even bigger loser than me. If Vine’s MAGCON boys got melanin injections and did a one month free trial of CrossFit, the result would be these lads. Except unlike the shirtless six second stars, tweetdeckers aren’t becoming rich or famous—they’re just getting shit tons of retweets and likes.

The Fall

In March of this year, at the peak of their pseudo fame, the OG Deck Boys tragically fell victim to a Twitter purge that banished them their accounts, which primarily served as their sole source of pride, to the dark chambers of eternal suspensions. Apparently, they were breaking Twitter’s rules by using the TweetDeck app to automatically mass RT each other in order to artificially inflate the action they got on their tweets. I don’t fully understand the inner-workings of the operation, and that’s probably why I’m stuck doing peasant numbers on my tweets.

In the months that followed, I’d imagine most of them sulked in their loss of celeb status and resorted to becoming Instagram meme accounts, YouTube reactors, self-made hundredaire MLM salesmen, or Zumies employees.

More Than Just Retweets?

In the midst of doing my research, I came across some disturbing stats that led me to believe that these guys were actually earning more than just likes and retweets. A January BuzzFeed article claimed that elite Tweetdeckers like @Simpnmild were making anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000 per month from charging people to join their TweetDeck groups, citing Twitter user @Simpnmild. While it’s hard to believe these gentlemen were making upper-class North Dakota salaries from running secret Twitter clubs, it’s important to remember that Fortnite players and Paul brothers became multimillionaires solely from playing Fortnite on camera and being Paul brothers (shitty and loud) on camera, respectively. Regardless, I was intrigued by those alleged figures and wanted to find out if the new breed of tweetdeckers were finding ways to make money from Twitter.

DM For Promo

If you scroll back up and look at the collection of biographies that I so graciously included for your viewing pleasure, you’ll notice the phrase “dm for promo” was a commonality. But, what the fuck does that mean? Are these mischievous rugrats discreetly running some kind of lucrative business? I went undercover from a backup account and asked the sources directly.

Incredible. This man hit me with a fucking menu of pricing options like I was signing up for a country club membership. And some of your sons are using your credit cards to fund the Supreme bumper stickers on this guy’s Mazda.

This one was interesting. His link to @pimpcry strangely redirected me to a mysterious account named Social Foster.

Take a look at this shit. Personal. Growth. Plan.

Personal. Growth. Plan. Not for your muscle mass or your small business. For tweets. For fucking tweets. Take your shame and launch it directly into outer space.

So there you have it. People are paying these guys, or these guys are paying each other, to tweet for them. Again, people are paying real American currency to have these guys use their expert, professional methods of copy and pasting other peoples’ tweets for them.

If any of this bothers you more than a medium amount, it probably shouldn’t. It’s an act that’s been going on since the early days of Twitter. When 30 year old dudes were making a living from notoriously burglarizing popular tweets and Tumblr quotes under the guise of Pixar fish and animated princesses. These were the pioneers who paved the way for tweetdeckers—the humble grown men who anonymously penned viral hits from nom de plumes like Common White Girl, Girl Posts, and Tweet Like A Girl. Unfortunately, they seem to be stuck in the shadows of damnation and won’t be making a comeback any time soon.

The most devastating Disney death since Mufasa.