It started as a dare combined with a sociological experiment and seasoned with a dash of humor: Could three guys manage to get the hashtag #DeSantis2024 trending on Donald Trump’s Truth Social site?
And if they could get the hashtag trending, what would happen next?
Ari Cagan, Adam Faze, and Peter McIndoe are best known for their satirical “Birds Aren’t Real” movement and decided they’d use another site, TikTok, to see if they could indeed make Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) trend on Truth Social.
They succeed, and wound up taking down the ex-president’s site with their gag, NBC News reports.
“If only 100 of us make accounts and post with a new hashtag, it will literally be trending, and Trump will see it,” McIndoe told the camera in a shaky video in front of Trump Tower in New York. “So in my opinion, the hashtag we should use is #desantis2024.”
#DeSantis2024 it was, and in no time it became the leading topic on Truth Social, going from nowhere at the beginning of the week to the top spot, with 1,500 mentions overnight.
You want viral? That’s viral with some major attitude.
What happened next? Truth Social went dark, according to Vice News:
One user who took part in the campaign, who had never used his account to post anything before and only posted the term #desantis2024, claimed his account was banned as a result.
But despite the downtime and possible banned users, the #DeSantis2024 hashtag continued to trend on Truth Social on Wednesday, along with the hashtag #ResearchBirdSurveillance, which is a reference to the viral satire/conspiracy theory movement known as “Birds Aren’t Real” that McIndoe started in 2017.
But perhaps most incredible of all is how three guys with cell phones managed to take down a former president’s social media site. That led Adam Faze to remark with delight, “What TikTok is best at is noticing when something is getting lots of traction and starting to show that same video, then, to the masses. We could never have done this on another platform. This was made for a mobile audience, and it was definitely a stunt that was pulled off only with a phone.”
Truth Social has refused to comment on the incident, but it’s likely that Trump told engineers to shut down the site when he saw DeSantis trending. After all, we know what a thin-skinned and delicate little snowflake Donnie is.
