"I feel like if you had 50,000 retweets on something two years ago, you would go on 'Ellen,'" Mezrahi said. It also means that the impact of viral things are reduced. Things go incredibly viral, and are then replaced by something else the next day. #1 samir August 16, 2017Īs Mezrahi has worked with the web, he's noticed that virality happens at a faster pace. The song hit the top 50 in iTunes's chart ranking. It's a blank song that's meant to play when you turn on your car, instead of another song on your iPod that's the first alphabetically in your library. He recently released the single "A a a a a Very Good Song" on iTunes. Mezrahi has also branched out to making other viral projects. He's an expert on how the web treats viral subjects. "We wanted a way to kind of amplify these things that go viral. So I started Kale Salad kind as a way to give to the creators and those random people who had these funny stories." "I always liked viral memes and social news," Mezrahi said. BuzzFeed was also an outlet where he could appreciate memes. Mezrahi hatched the idea for Kale Salad after a stint at BuzzFeed, where he led the company's social media system and worked on its editorial strategy (he's also worked as the head of social media for the viral animal site The Dodo). Kale Salad started when Mezrahi wanted to boost smaller Twitter users. He also has some help: His followers send him original viral tweets in direct messages, and he maintains a Slack team where people chat about viral memes and share them. It's hard to be like, 'who was the original creator of it?' when that happens." "Someone might have tweeted it earlier, but someone else's went viral. "One thing the internet's taught me is there's so many people with the same joke or the same idea," Mezrahi said. And when the talent agency CAA signed on to represent Ostrovsky, the issue came to a head, with comedians accusing him of joke theft. People complained about it since his Instagram account grew in popularity in the early 2010s. Many of the screenshots have the name and handle of the tweeter cropped out. His popular Instagram account is mostly just screenshots of other people's tweets captioned with a bad original joke. Take, for example, The Fat Jew, born to his parents as Josh Ostrovsky. For one, these accounts strike sponsorship deals that make them tons of money - largely off the backs of original content creators who go completely uncompensated. They don't care so much where they come from.īut crediting the people behind viral stuff on the web really matters. People follow "parody" accounts like Dory, Relatable Quotes (3.8 million followers on Twitter), and tina (900,000) - many of which have blocked Mezrahi on Twitter - because they're an easy, centralized way to find funny tweets. Stealing tweets is a huge problem on the web.įor many people, taking an original tweet isn't a big deal. "It's part searching Twitter, using Tweetdeck to search, and different parameters for search," Mezrahi said. Mezrahi spends a lot of time on the platform and has a knack for spotting original viral content. He often succeeds even when it's a generic caption attached to an image, or a reaction gif that resists Twitter's not-so-great search function. Mezrahi does the legwork of fixing that, digging through Twitter to find the original tweets. And because the internet is so big, it's not always easy to give - or get - credit when it's due. It's easy to reproduce something digital. Plagiarizing content is a problem inherent to the web. "But hopefully my account can do the same and directly give back to the people who created it." -Izzy Humair Febru-Dory Febru-Steven Carson Febru-memes Febru-tiffany Aug-Dory August 18, 2017 "For awhile, it was hard for people to find good stuff on Twitter," Mezrahi told INSIDER.
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