About

#BackpackChallenge is a video series in which participants run through a gauntlet of people swinging and throwing backpacks to knock them to the ground.

Origin

On November 18th, 2016, Twitter user @abucciwood posted a video in which a young man is knocked to the ground by group of people throwing backpacks (shown below). Within five days, the video gained over 30,700 likes and 26,500 retweets.

Spread

The following day, Twitter user @PhillipM07 posted a similar video in which a young man runs through a corridor of people throwing backpacks in a locker room (shown below).

Also on November 19th, the Views YouTube channel uploaded a compilation of #BackpackChallenge videos, gaining more than 42,500 views in the next four days (shown below, left). On November 21st, the TopClips247 channel uploaded another compilation video (shown below, right).

That day, Twitter user @cmit03 posted a #BackpackChallenge video taken at a high school (shown below). In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the video fad, including Mashable,^[1] The Daily Dot,^[2] The Telegraph^[3] and NY Mag.^[4]

Search Interest

External References