About

Calling Kobe Bryant At 3AM refers to two viral YouTube 3AM Challenge videos published by YouTuber ItsJack and Jolto following the death of Kobe Bryant. In the January 2020 videos, both YouTubers pretended to text with Kobe Bryant and claimed that he was still alive. Both YouTubers were widely criticized online ad deleted their original videos.

Origin

On January 27th, 2019, a day after Kobe Bryant passed away due to a helicopter accident YouTuber Jolto or Josh Giles posted the video titled, "CALLING KOBE BRYANT AT 3 AM! OMG HE ACTUALLY ANSWERED (HES NOT DEAD)" which has since been deleted but re-uploaded multiple times to YouTube (shown below, left). Another YouTuber named Jack Martin, known as ItsJack posted an extremely similar video the same night (shown below, right).

Spread

On January 27th, 2020, Keemstar] tweeted a screenshot of one of the YouTube videos with the caption, "Fucking scumbags" which gained over 55,300 likes and 4,000 retweets in two days. Soon after, @KEEMSTAR^[2] tweeted, "After I tweeted this , He’s now hypying his apology video now!!! 😂😂😂! You can’t make this shit up. Kids will literally do and say anything for clout!" (shown below, right) which garnered over 12,100 likes and 600 retweets in two days.

On January 27th, @Jaack^[3] tweeted Jolto's YouTube video with the caption "Can you actually fucking do something about this? Take a stand for once @YouTube – cunts like this are destroying your platform" which received over 8,400 likes and 600 retweets in two days. That same day, Redditor ethanlou posted driipboz "Press E to launch that little shit" image to r/dankmemes^[4] which accumulated over 520 points (96% upvoted) in two days. Bothe PopBuzz^[6] and Dexerto^[5] covered the story.

Various Examples

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External References