About

The Invisible Box Challenge is a social game in which people film themselves mime tapping on an imaginary box and stepping over a roughly foot-high step. The challenge being keeping your one foot still, as if braced on the box, while other leaps over the designation.

Origin

On August 18th, 2017, Twitter ^[1] user @thecvmevp posted a video of football player Dontez Hines stepping over an imaginary box. They captioned the post "Stepping over you haters like🤚🏽." The post (shown below) received more than 25,000 retweets and 53,000 likes in four months.

Spread

Four months later, on December 2nd, Twitter^[2] user @arielo1220 tweeted, "challenge accepted." In addition, they posted a video of a cheerleader stepping over the box in the same motion. The post (shown below) received more than 138,000 retweets and 275,000 likes in three days. According to a later interview, the video was first published to Snapchat.

Shortly after the video was posted, others online began posting videos of themselves doing the challenge. On December 3rd, Twitter^[3] user @crackyraps posted a video of a man stepping over the "box" onto a couch. The post (shown below) recieved more than 8,300 retweets and 24,000 likes in two days.

On December 5th, ABC News^[4] interviewed Ariel Olivar (@arielo1220), who explained how to do the move. Several other media outlets covered the trend, including NBC,^[5] Daily Mail,^[8] Telegraph,^[9] Mirror,^[10] The Guardian,^[11] The Sun,^[12] TIME^[6] and more. Twitter^[7] published a Moments page covering the popularity of the game.

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External References