The Debrief has spent a lot of time on the internet this year. Well, duh. And as well as the celebrity stories and the serious stories, there have been a whole bunch of stories or just silly/moving videos or memes going about. These are our favourites, the ones we think pretty much sum up this year.
Daniel Pierce – 7,233,308 views
Our hearts broke when, in August, we saw this video of Daniel Pierce’s family trying to stage an intervention about the 19-year-old’s sexuality. Filmed pretty bravely on his iPhone, it’s almost a blessing that we can’t see what’s going on so much as hear it because it really is tough to listen to – especially the bit where a female member of his family tries to use God as a way of making him feel like shit:
‘No, you can deny it all you want to, but I believe in the word of God, and God creates nobody that way. It’s a path that you have chosen to choose.’
On the upside, the context around the video is a lot more positive. After his parents looked to chuck him out of home, Daniel’s boyfriend started a crowdfund for ‘living expenses’ – and by the time we wrote about it, £56,511 had been raised!
Taylor Hatala – 11,031,957 views
So, the lyrics to Anaconda are hardly vague, but we figure that 11 years old isn’t too young to listen to a song going ‘I got a big fat ass’. It’s basically All About That Bass without any of the beating about the bush. That’s why we totally loved this video of Taylor Hatala dancing to Nicki Minaj’s song.
David Cameron – 4,308,859 views
It’s childish, but you’ve got to hand it to Cassetteboy’s diligence when cutting together loads of David Cameron’s speeches to make him look like a much meaner man than he is. His rap against the poor came at the same time as the Conservative party conference, and was abundantly more interesting.
12-year-old Amanda [we don’t know her surname] – 79,166 views
OK, so this didn’t even get more than 80,000 views, but this is our list so we’re allowed to revisit this charming clip of a girl crying as her parents surprise her by taking her to see Lorde. Not only does she actually like Lorde more than us – something we didn’t think was too possible – but Lorde herself saw the video and said it made her a bit ‘teary’, which is just doubly sweet.
Jeremy Meeks **– 101,000 Facebook likes **
So you know how in the US the local police stations upload all their mugshots to Facebook? No, us neither, until we got to see Jeremy Meeks, possibly the most beautiful felon in the world. The grey-eyed, stubbly-chiselled-chinned badman captured our hearts simply because, well, he is utterly beautiful.
Though there were jokes that he could get a modelling contract to lift him out of a life of crime, but that never really came about.
**Flappy Bird – 50 million downloads **
Cast your mind back to the very beginning of the year, before the Kim Kardashian game had come out, before an MP got caught playing Candy Crush on his iPad during an official meeting. What were you doing? You were playing Flappy Bird, obvs.
The problem with the game’s overwhelming popularity (something to do with the fact it was actually incredibly difficult to play) was that Dong Nguyen, the man who created the game, couldn't handle the fame it was bringing him or the addiction it imposed on its players; he removed it from mobile app stores.
**Alex From Target **
Sometimes there are people you see IRL and you just can’t believe how beautiful they are. Normally we’d say it’s a bit creepy to take a photo of them, but when 15-year-old Brooklyn Reiff saw Alex from Target, she was probably so awash with teenage hormonal lust that she didn’t think to do the normal thing and get chatting to him, ascertain any mutual friends and his surname and then stalk him on Facebook.
So she took a photo, put it on social media and BAM, he was an internet sensation. Sadly, the bright-eyed guy was subjected to competition – soon emerged Kieran from T-Mobile, Steve from Starbucks and Daquan from Staples. Oh, and death threats.
We figure Paper magazine’s decision to #breaktheinternet with Kim Kardashian’s bum wasn’t only inspired by the photographer Jean Paul Goude’s reputation for using Photoshop to accentuate the boobs and bums of his subjects. It was also looking to tap into some of the hype Nicki Minaj’s bum got after she put out her cover for Anaconda.
Both of these images went viral, but not just the originals. Keen jokesters with an eye for superimposing wrecking balls or Bruce Willis’s bald head onto bumcheeks had a lol with these images, editing them to make some sort of joke along the lines of ‘Oh my god, look at her butt!’
The woman outside an abortion clinic – 5,075,581
In the UK, sadly, a group called Abort 67 like to spend their days waiting outside family planning clinics (or abortion clinics) to protest against women choosing to not have babies. When a journalist for The Guardian went to one protest in South London, he didn’t expect this to happen.
A heavily pregnant woman – whose name is being kept from the media for her protection – decided to interrupt the conversation about the body cameras the protestors were wearing, which could have been used for illegally filming people seeking medical help.
‘Madam, what? I am talking,’ she begins, before explaining that anti-choicers are in the wrong place, and that if they want to really help children, actual living children, they need to go and support Kids Company, a local charity, instead. She puts it way better than us.
The woman walking down a street in New York City – 38,240,254
As far as social experiments go, we get that sometimes a hidden camera can work in showing what people’s attitudes are like, but the video of a woman walking through New York for 10 hours had its problems. Yes, she was catcalled over a hundred times, followed and yelled at for not talking back, and we could empathise with that bone-chilling feeling of not being safe.
However, when the director later admitted to cutting out any of the white men who had harassed the woman, problems with the video’s message became evident. It’s still interesting to watch, but we’d like a little less racial bias in our social experiments, please.
**Liked this? You might also be interested in: **
Follow Sophie on Twitter @Sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.