What Country Is This? / Peter Sutherland Creepypasta

About

What Country Is This? or Peter Sutherland Creepypasta is a spam comment, copypasta and creepypasta primarily found on TikTok in early 2024. The meme started in January 2024 after Philippine comedian Fonz created the creepypasta story of a white man supposedly called Peter Sutherland who was looking for his lost daughter Sandra Sutherland after she went on a Southeast Asia trip in 2020 and disappeared mysteriously. To find her, he went to several Asian creators' videos on TikTok asking, "What country is this?" or "Which country is this?" in the hopes of finding his daughter. The meme grew exponentially on the platform over the following days as users started to create fake accounts using the white man selfie as their profile picture to spam other people's comment sections with the catchphrase.

Origin

On January 19th, 2024, Philiphine comedian Fonz, known on TikTok^[1] as @ribsp, recorded a fanfic video about a white man called Peter Sutherland, an American from Wyoming who, in 2020, was searching for his daughter Sandra Sutherland after she went on a month-long vacation to Southeast Asia. As the man had no condition to fly to Asia, he decided to look for clues about Sandra's whereabouts using social media and commenting on people's content "What country is this?" or "Which country is this?" trying to pinpoint her location.

The creator ends the story by saying Peter passed away alone in his house in November 2023 without finding his daughter and that now his random comments started to appear on Southeast Asian TikTok users' videos, suggesting he still looking for her, even after his death. The video (shown below) amassed more than 6 million plays and 137,000 likes in a week.

Spread

Approximately a day after the @ribsp video was posted, comments on people's videos on TikTok using the "Peter Sutherland" selfie and his phrase "What country is this?" became a viral copypasta. For example, on January 20th, 2024, TikTok^[2] user @vinzetalk posted a recording of his For You page on TikTok, showing some of the fake accounts and spam comments (shown below, left), which amassed more than 1 million plays and 12,000 likes in five days.

On January 23rd, TikTok^[3] user tina.kutumela posted a video (shown below, right) in which she joined the trend by changing her profile picture and spamming people's videos with the phrase, "What country is this?" She also showed some of the replies she got from people who didn't know about the meme, amassing roughly 228,000 plays and 9,200 likes in a day.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References