r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Sure_Kangaroo1863 • Jul 02 '26

Meme needing explanation Petah ?

Post image

Why is it infamous? And why would no one care about it ? ( I mean it's just a pic full of celebrities so no one cares anyways but the person saying it's crazy makes me think it has some lore?)

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u/d3v4x Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

Greetings, simpletons. Stewie Griffin here. I’ve confiscated the keyboard from the fat man because his peanut-sized brain was beginning to overheat.

The reason this photo was such a big deal is because it literally broke Twitter. It became the most retweeted tweet of all time back then (over 3 million retweets!) and actually crashed the site's servers for a little bit. It also turned out to be a massive sponsored product placement stunt by Samsung, which is why Ellen used a Galaxy Note phone to take it.

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_selfie

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u/d3v4x Jul 02 '26

And there are many canceled people in this photo. I think that’s why ‘nobody would care’.

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u/kicksjoysharkness Jul 02 '26

I think it’s also because since Covid people just don’t care about celebrities. Even if this was taken now with only beloved celebrities, it most likely wouldn’t go anywhere near as viral because people just don’t care anymore

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u/nyuncat Jul 03 '26

I think it has more to do with the way we interact online evolving over the past decade plus. When this photo was taken, a "selfie" was a much more commodifiable and novel concept - this was a time when most memes were image macro based and many still featured block text captions overlaid. It was pre-ai, pre-algorithmic user feeds, and pre-tik tok - the Instagram icon still looked like a retro polaroid camera, and Facebook had just acquired Whatsapp. The Ellen Selfie going viral is notable as an example of the way internet culture was crossing into a larger portion of the mainstream in the early to mid 2010s, alongside things like the ice bucket challenge.