Awkwardly Smiling With Celebrities

Background

On January16th, Redditor GWNIII^[1] compiled 100 photographs of an acquaintance posing with celebrities from his Facebook page into an album^[2] on image hosting service imgur, which was subsequently linked in a thread on Reddit^[3]. The post quickly made to the front page of the site, receiving 22,426 upvotes and a score of 2257. The album itself accrued over 6.14 million views in 24 hours and nearly 400 Twitter shares.^[11]

According to the album description, there are approximately 800 additional photographs with celebrities that remain unpublished.

Developments

Identity

While GWNIII has chosen to keep the man’s identity secret, as the compilation was published without his knowledge, several clues within the photograph narrow down his location to Nashville, Tennessee. His photo with Kid Rock has the sign from Nashville steakhouse The Palm behind them and in his photo with Ke$ha, a city police car is in the background.

Online Reaction

The photos were reshared on Uproxx^[6], BroBible^[7], Dangerous Minds^[8], Ebaum’s World^[9] and the Daily What Gossip.^[10]

Two Reddit AMA request^[4] threads were started the same day, but GWNIII responded to one^[5], saying that he would be answering a short Q&A, but did not want to participate in an all-out AMA thread.

Notable Examples

External References