About

The Screw Loose Emoji is a vector graphic emoticon and emoji that is making an incredulous expression while twirling a finger around his temple, as if to indicate that someone is crazy or has a screw loose. The emoji is often sourced from stock image websites like Alamy and Shutterstock, among others. In July 2023, memes using the Screw Loose Emoji surfaced on Twitter, after a series of tweets using the image graphic went viral. The emoji is used to portray the notion that someone else is crazy or has a screw loose.

Origin

The earliest known upload of the Screw Loose Emoji was a post to Alamy^[1] by Yael Weiss (seen below). The image was captioned, "Emoticon showing a screw loose sign by twisting his finger into temple. You are crazy sign" (seen below).

Spread

There are sporadic instances of the Screw Loose Emoji being used to indicate one's opinion that someone else is crazy on Twitter and 4chan before the year 2019.^[2][3][8] On March 18th, 2023, Twitter^[4] user @albert12798 posted the Screw Loose Emoji alongside the caption, "we are not dating it’s all in your mind," gathering over 1,000 likes in four months (seen below, left). On June 16th, Twitter^[5] user @growing_daniel posted a tweet that read, "Okay buddy sure the language models are going to become sentient and try to take over the world by exterminating all humans," gathering over 500 likes in two days (seen below, right).

On July 16th, 2023, Twitter^[6] user @IncelProust posted the Screw Loose Emoji alongside a tweet that read, "Reading Mein Kampf in public and doing this the whole time," gathering over 100,000 likes in two days (seen below, left). On July 18th, Twitter^[7] user @cleoofffilm posted the same emoji alongside a tweet that read, "watching american psycho with my date and doing this every 5 minutes," gathering over 40,000 like in a day (seen below, right).

Related Memes

Shaking My Head the Whole Time

Shaking My Head the Whole Time refers to a series of jokes describing humorous scenarios in which people publicly doing something that could considered controversial, such as reading a controversial book, shake their head horizontally the entire time to signal to others that they strongly disagree with the message. Spawned by a viral tweet, the format has been used since late December 2020.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References