- Lil Nas X’s “nah he tweakin” comment about Tony Hawk’s new skateboard went viral on Wednesday.
- The artist commented the phrase on an Instagram post about Hawk’s new skateboard featuring blood.
- The founder of that Instagram page told Insider he had never seen something blow up like that.
The phrase “nah he tweakin” went viral on Wednesday after Lil Nas X used it in a comment about Tony Hawk, spawning a social media craze where thousands of people pasted the same three words across the internet.
Lil Nas X, whose real name is Montero Lamar Hill, appeared to be dissing Hawk, who had just announced that he was selling $500 custom skateboards painted with his own blood. Earlier this year, Lil Nas X promoted shoes made with a drop of blood and received significant backlash, while Hawk’s announcement hasn’t levied the same response.
After Lil Nas X commented “nah he tweaking,” an army of people began to spam the same three words across loads of celebrities’ Instagram comment sections, with the slogan eventually leaking onto other social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube.
“Tweakin” is an African American Vernacular English (AAVE) term used to describe a person saying or doing something outlandish or annoying, according to the submission-based online slang guide Urban Dictionary.
As of Thursday afternoon, the top comments of recent posts by many famous Instagram pages — from TikTok star Addison Rae and the meme page “F—Jerry” to trap artist Lil Gnar — were flooded with “nah he tweakin” comments.
The phrase became so viral that Instagram’s communications team used it in a tweet referencing a comments-section glitch on the app.
Some people speculated that the mass spam of the same phrase all over the platform caused the glitch, in which some accounts couldn’t load comments sections. Instagram did not respond to a request for comment at press time.
Here’s why Lil Nas X’s comment spread on social media.
Lil Nas X appeared to diss Tony Hawk
Hawk’s decision to make skateboards with blood comes after Lil Nas X received widespread condemnation in March and April for designing shoes containing blood.
“Now that Tony Hawk has released skateboards with his blood painted on them, and there was no public outrage, are y’all ready to admit y’all were never actually upset over the blood in the shoes?” Lil Nas X wrote in a Wednesday tweet that reached over 60,000 retweets and 400,000 likes.
—MONTERO 🦋 (@LilNasX) August 25, 2021
Lil Nas X commented “nah he tweakin” on a post about Hawk’s skateboard announcement from @rap, an Instagram account with 8.4 million followers that often shares news updates about the hip-hop community.
The post features a picture of Hawk and the subtitle, “Tony Hawk is selling skateboards infused with his blood for $500 each.”
Lil Nas X’s comment appeared to be a response to the end of the post’s caption, “Yall rockin with it!?”
The comment itself has over 130,000 likes.
The comment sparked a ‘copypasta’ meme
The phrase quickly spiraled into a viral “copypasta” meme, a chunk of text that gets copied and pasted incessantly on social media platforms, according to the meme history website KnowYourMeme.
On Wednesday, “nah he tweakin” was the second-most-popular Google search query in the United States, amassing over 500,000 searches, according to Google Trends. People searching for the expression’s definition was a main related query.
Daniel Snow, the founder of @rap, the account where Lil Nas X left the original comment, told Insider that he has never seen anything blow up like “nah he tweakin.”
“That comment was the only thing people were able to see in the comment section. I don’t know if that’s happened on Instagram before, I’ve never seen that happen,” he said in a phone call.
Snow said his team thought it was a spam “bot at first” when they started getting “thousands of comments nonstop.”
According to Snow, the @rap account gained over 50,000 new followers in just 12 hours.
Lil Nas X and Hawk did not respond to requests for comment.
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