About

Marmitage refers to a scandal involving two young Brazilian women who made a project to donate lunchboxes to homeless people every day called the ​Alimentando Necessidades project. However, suspicion about its legitimacy spread on social media, going viral on Twitter in September 2022, gaining the nickname of #marmitagate, similar to the Memegate trend.

Origin

On September 26th, 2022, Alimentando Necessidades,^[1] a social project of giving lunchboxes to homeless people, created by two Brazilian girls named Duda Poleza and Taynara Motta,^[3] started to trend on Twitter after some users found threads^[2] with screenshots of text messages between the two project coordinators. In the screenshots, they appear to be trying to scam others with the project, causing users to suspect their behavior, with some going so far as to suspect that Taynara is not a real person. The local news site @omunicipioblu^[4] shared the story, accumulating 66,000 likes and 15,000 retweets in four days (shown below). The thread gave the scandal the name #MarmitaGate.

Spread

The post by @omunicipioblu led Twitter users to investigate the project further and accumulate evidence that it could be a scam. Twitter user @ca_reis made a post showing how the social media stes of the project used the same lunchbox pictures on different posts. The post received 22,000 likes and 1.7 million views in four days.

After being pressured on social media, the two coordinators decided to do a live video to prove that they exist on September 26th, 2022. One of the girls, Taynara Motta, posted a video (quickly deleted after uploaded) defending the project and saying that everything would be explained on their Instagram's live stream that day. However, users suspected that Taynara could be another project coordinator, with lots of social media filters to make her look like another person (see below).

The live stream on Instagram gathered 12,000 viewers to hear project coordinator Duda Poleza's side of the story. Some people used the live to send comments to her to prove the project is real. User @abioneb posted a screenshot asking Poleza to name three homeless people she'd help posted on September 26th, 2022, by @abioneb, in which a user asks Duda to say the name of three homeless people she helped.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References