Oct 20, 20263 min read

Today in Viral Internet: October 20

A haunted Facebook app, a Korean drama takeover and a meme coin moonshot. October 20 stays viral.

OMYGOTTI

Toronto hip-hop artist | 730K+ Facebook

2011

Take This Lollipop Turns Your Facebook Into a Horror Movie

On October 17, 2011, director Jason Zada launched takethislollipop.com with a single tweet. By October 20 the interactive horror short was exploding everywhere. The concept was simple and terrifying: connect your Facebook account, and the app pulled your own photos and messages into a two and a half minute film where a stalker, played by Bill Oberst Jr., studies your profile and comes looking for you.

The numbers were unreal. Four hundred thousand views in the first 24 hours. Within 29 days it had been seen by more than 60 million people and racked up 10 million Facebook likes, making it the fastest growing Facebook app of November 2011. It was also the first time millions of people really confronted how much of themselves they had posted online.

My take: The scariest Halloween costume is your own digital footprint. Fifteen years later, the lesson only hits harder.

2021

Squid Game Becomes the Internet's Favorite Show

Netflix's Squid Game premiered on September 17, 2021, but October is when it became a full blown internet takeover. By mid October it was the number one show in more than 90 countries and on track to become Netflix's biggest series ever. TikTok did the heavy lifting. The #SquidGame hashtag blew past 22 billion views as fans recreated everything from red light green light to the dalgona candy challenge.

The dalgona challenge became the defining trend of October 2021, with millions carving shapes into honeycomb candy and posting the results. Brands, footballers and your little cousin all got in on it. It was the rare moment where the whole internet watched the same show and memed it in real time.

My take: A Korean drama with no promotion budget conquered the planet through memes. The internet remains undefeated.

2025

Elon Musk Appoints His Dog as CEO of X

Elon Musk was back at it on October 20, 2025. The post was an AI generated video of his dog Floki, tie on, glasses on, parked behind a desk full of paperwork, with Musk declaring, 'Floki is back on the job as X CEO.' A joke, sure. The crypto market treated it like a news alert anyway. FLOKI, the meme coin named for that same dog, jumped 25 percent on the day, touched a ten day high, and sat near an 800 million dollar market cap while it did it.

We have seen this movie before, twice. At Christmas in 2021, a single 'Floki Santa' photo from Musk preceded a run of nearly 20,000 percent inside 48 hours. In February 2023, another round of Floki as CEO jokes had the coin up by double digits in a matter of minutes. So the lesson is old by now, but October 20, 2025 underlined it again: one post from the right account is a market event.

My take: A dog in a tie moved hundreds of millions. The internet economy is just built different.