Today in Viral Internet: October 20
A haunted Facebook app, a Korean drama takeover and a meme coin moonshot. October 20 stays viral.
Take This Lollipop Turns Your Facebook Into a Horror Movie
On October 17, 2011, director Jason Zada launched takethislollipop.com with a single tweet. By October 20 the interactive horror short was exploding everywhere. The concept was simple and terrifying: connect your Facebook account, and the app pulled your own photos and messages into a two and a half minute film where a stalker, played by Bill Oberst Jr., studies your profile and comes looking for you.
The numbers were unreal. Four hundred thousand views in the first 24 hours. Within 29 days it had been seen by more than 60 million people and racked up 10 million Facebook likes, making it the fastest growing Facebook app of November 2011. It was also the first time millions of people really confronted how much of themselves they had posted online.
Squid Game Becomes the Internet's Favorite Show
Netflix's Squid Game premiered on September 17, 2021, but October is when it became a full blown internet takeover. By mid October it was the number one show in more than 90 countries and on track to become Netflix's biggest series ever. TikTok did the heavy lifting. The #SquidGame hashtag blew past 22 billion views as fans recreated everything from red light green light to the dalgona candy challenge.
The dalgona challenge became the defining trend of October 2021, with millions carving shapes into honeycomb candy and posting the results. Brands, footballers and your little cousin all got in on it. It was the rare moment where the whole internet watched the same show and memed it in real time.
Elon Musk Appoints His Dog as CEO of X
On October 20, 2025, Elon Musk posted an AI generated video on X showing his dog Floki in a tie and glasses, sitting at a desk covered with documents. The caption: 'Floki is back on the job as X CEO.' It was a joke, but crypto markets do not joke around. The FLOKI meme coin surged 25 percent that day, hitting a ten day high with a market cap around 800 million dollars.
It was not the first time a Musk dog post moved markets. His Christmas 2021 'Floki Santa' photo sent the coin up nearly 20,000 percent in 48 hours, and a February 2023 joke about Floki taking over X sent it soaring by double digits in minutes. The lesson is old by now, but October 20, 2025 made it official: one tweet from the right account is a market event.
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