Who Will Save the Influencers from Themselves?

Everyone is bored. But no one is more bored than the social media influencers who have built often lucrative online careers around going outside, doing shit, and reporting it back to the rest of us average folk. Now that most of us are homebound, the creativity levels of every influencer—from the Kardashian family to the Instagram fashionistas—are being seriously tested. (The makeup influencers seem to be the only ones thriving as they design looks from home that pair well with surgical masks.) For everyone else, it’s been a journey.

Seemingly every single activity has now become a social media challenge, with celebrities, influencers and TikTok teens leading the charge. The first few were benign: looking at you, Savage challenge. Then they got more involved. There was the push-up challenge after everyone took to fitfluencing. Picking up steam is the shot challenge, where you see a shot and take a shot—or as we used to call it back in my day, alcoholism. After the Gal Gadot Imagine incident, it seemed like the worst had passed, but the internet will never fail to top itself.

Enter, the “coronavirus challenge,” which has people licking toilet seats and ice cream tubs in stores for the sake of licking fucking anything. The internet youths have decided that while everyone else is maintaining a distance of at least six feet it would be “funny” to spread even more germs. (Fucking hysterical.) One Snapchat user, Cody Pfister, uploaded a video of himself licking the packaging on rolls of toilet paper in a store. According to a local Fox affiliate in Missouri, Pfister was arrested and charged with making a terrorist threat. This latest attempt at clout traces back to Ava Louise a self-proclaimed messy skinny queen who appears to be a wannabe insta-model. Louise posted a TikTok video of herself licking the toilet seat in an airplane bathroom about a week ago which inspired her fellow TikTok user Larz, to lick a toilet as well. Unrelated to all this licking, Larz has tested positive for coronavirus and deleted his Twitter account along with his toilet video. These kids are in their 20s.

If this is where influencers are at the beginning of what will likely be a long period of social distancing, it will be truly bizarre to see where they land a month from now. Wash your hands. Wash your tongues.