Everyone Wants to Be a Hot, Anxious Girl on Twitter

Here’s a very popular tweet: “she’s a 10 but she cries on her birthday every year.”

Solid. Concise. I can see why people would relate to the sentiment. Who doesn’t want to think of themselves as hot? And further, who doesn’t already think of themselves as emotionally complicated enough to shed a tear on a day that is supposed to be happy? Nearly 246,000 accounts liked this tweet, and I have no problem with that.

There’s a whole universe of big accounts that post content like this—little snippets of language with mass appeal. They often regurgitate the same messages. That “she’s a 10” tweet was posted by @itspureluv, an account with roughly 200,000 followers; an almost identical tweet was posted by @spicybabew, another account with nearly 200,000 followers, three months earlier, and by dozens of others at various times.

“are u ok” no but i’m pretty

— ♡ (@itspureluv) October 10, 2022

I started noticing this phenomenon last year and followed about a dozen of these accounts out of a curiosity that felt kind of sick—they gave me a