I Write About Viral Moments. Then I Became One
Robert Young
Updated on March 29, 2026
Just as the reunion episode was wrapping up, my phone began buzzing. I was getting a string of notifications from Twitter. Although I had protected my tweets, I could still be tagged in random posts. In one, someone had shared a picture of their TV screen, which featured talking heads and a tweet. I squinted, trying to decipher what it read.
“Oh my God,” I said. “This can’t be happening.”
“What?” my husband asked, confused about why I had suddenly pressed pause. I was about to enter a new, far less entertaining “social experiment.” I switched back to MSNBC. Brian Williams’s show, The 11th Hour, was still on air. I began to rewind through the last 40 minutes of programming. I wanted to throw up, faint, or both.
“This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening…,” I continued to mutter under my breath as my husband stared at me.
I found the spot in the show where my tweet was featured. I pressed play. And—in a mixture of pure mortification and utter disbelief—I watched as Williams not only mentioned my tweet but proceeded to actually discuss it as though my math were correct. (Well, I watched some of the segment before burying my face into the couch in horror.)
“It’s an incredible way of putting it,” Williams said after reading a screenshot of my tweet to his guest pundit, Mara Gay, a member of the New York Times editorial board. “It’s an incredible way of putting it,” Gay responded. “It’s true, it’s disturbing.”
“No, no, no, no,” I kept repeating. I turned to my husband. “This can’t be real. Is this a nightmare? Can you pinch me?” He’s not a man who shocks easily these days, but he looked about as speechless as I’d ever seen him.
Needless to say, it didn’t blow over. It blew up. Several major news outlets, including The Associated Press and the Washington Post, covered the story. I was a punchline on the most recent episode of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. At its height, my tweet had permeated enough of the social discourse to enter Twitter’s top trending topics.
