"Tag a Friend and Don't Say Anything"

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About

"Tag a Friend and Don't Say Anything" and "Tag a Friend and Say Nothing" are popular captions on posts with strange content. The direction "tag a friend and say nothing" helps the post spread by inviting users to tag their friends, inviting them to see it, while providing no context that would explain the content. Posts with this caption experienced a surge in early 2017.

Origin

The caption appears to have started appearing as early as mid-2015. Some of the earliest known posts to use variations of the phrase include a Vine^[1] of a soccer save posted July 27th, 2015, and a video using the Spider-Man Ass Slap posted to Instagram^[2] on October 29th the same year.

Spread

In the summer of 2016, the phrase "tag a friend and don't say anything" began to draw a lot of traction on the now-defunct social messaging app Yik Yak, which was largely driven by X-Phaze^[6], an Internet hip hop artist and social media manager of the messaging app at the time. On July 14th, 2016, the Yik Yak Facebook page^[4] posted an image macro featuring the caption with an angry poop emoji, which went on to garner more than 1,500 likes and 4,700 comments (shown below, left). A few days later, on July 20th, Yik Yak's Facebook page^[5] posted another iteration of the meme with a drawing of a "gangster chicken nugget," accruing more than 51,000 likes and 311,000 comments (shown below, right).

tag someone who looks like an angry poop emoji IG:YIKYAKAPP o O

tag ur friend so they have to open their phone and look at this picture of a gangster chicken nugget for no reason IGAYIKYAKAPP

In the following months, X-Phaze continued to share original iterations of the meme through Yik Yak's Facebook page. On November 29th, 2016, an Instagram video by @funnyhoodvidz with the caption was posted to YouTube (shown below), though the original post has since been deleted.

"Tag Yourself and Don't Say Anything" started becoming a proper meme in the beginning of 2017, when dozens of videos appeared on YouTube and Instagram with that title. One of the first posted that year came on January 30th, and showed a remix of the Brazil Dog Dance.

Several other videos with the caption appeared in the coming months. However, none were as popular as an animation by Kirsten Lepore titled "Hi Stranger" (shown below).

Hi Stranger from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo.

On March 23rd, Facebook page Viral Thread^[3] picked up Lepore's film with the caption "tag a friend and say nothing" added. The video in that post was seen over 100 million times as of March 31st, 2017, as well as shared 1.3 million times and liked nearly 500,000 times.