The most significant social media moments of 2022

Comment - Hanna C. Nes

The children were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of goblin-core-quiet-quitting-yassified-Andrew-Tate-sbagliato danced in their heads.

Heidi Klum as a worm. Copyright: Gotham Film Magic / Insider

In a year that saw the supposed death knell of Twitter as Elon Musk got his grubby hands on the social media giant and the growing obsession and backlash against AI generated art, 2022 truly felt like the longest year of internet culture hell as we ran through micro trend on micro trend until all we wanted was to run into the woods and live as a worm (until Heidi Klum ruined that for us). Curation was at the core of this year’s trends, as we strove towards our warped view of modern “authenticity” in a mess of insta photo “dumps” (how long were those seemingly random photos in your drafts?), BeReal snaps, and TikTok confessionals.

So in the spirit of the end of year wrap up list, here’s my take on the most significant social media and internet culture trends of 2022.

Hating nepo babies: Vulture’s sprawling nepo-baby edition came out last week, featuring numerous scathing articles on the significance of nepotism in Hollywood and prompting thousands of families during holiday dinners around the world to ask “what’s a nepo baby?”. Nepotism is a tale as old as time, however, it was fascinating to see 2022 as the year where we all grabbed our pitchforks to yell about Brooklyn Beckham’s gin & tonic giving us absolutely nothing and so-and-so’s parent being a script supervisor on some forgotten 90s film as evidence of them nepo-babying their way into the movie business. Your fave is probably a nepo-baby, sorry! 

THAT MiuMiu skirt: Earlier this year, MiuMiu’s obscenely micro miniskirt took the internet and runway by storm, simultaneously announcing the unfortunate return of both y2k fashion and the waif thin body type. The skirt’s ubiquitous presence sparked debates on whether it symbolized the end of the body positive movement or was indicative of a greater feeling of fashion freedom for everyone.

BeReal: I’m gonna BeHonest: is every Gen Z on this godforsaken app?!?! BeReal, which claims to be “a new and unique way to discover who your friends really are in their daily life”, exploded this past year as it prompted users to send uncurated pictures of what they were up to. Some questioned if the app’s emphasis on authenticity went too far when one girl went viral after having posted a family funeral for all her friends to see. 

Ryanair’s TikTok: The budget airline’s TikTok account is everything a corporate social media account should be.

Spotify Wrapped: Every December, Santa’s elves (ooops - I meant the Spotify interns!) gift us the much anticipated Spotify Wrapped which tell users whether their music taste is trendy or ~alternative~, flooding Instagram stories everywhere. What has previously been a fun recap of our listening history has now become a sign of social currency and status, as some users painstakingly tried to break the algorithm in order to control their results. My number one artist was Mitski and if that’s not a cry for help, I don't know what is! 

Dating Wrapped: Developing out of the Spotify Wrapped obsession, TikTok was full of Dating Wrapped - a hilarious, and often depressing, wrap up of users’ 2022 woe-begotten dating lives. Boiling down their personal lives to a few slides of statistics and academic-yzing their swiping habits, this was a fun way to poke at how online dating is simultaneously the worst and best invention of our time. 

The over-saturation of aesthetics/eras/modes: Nearly everything on earth became an aesthetic/era/mode this year, infuriating philosophy professors everywhere and the ghost of Immanuel Kant. From the Bridget Jones-esque “frazzled English woman” aesthetic to the idea of feral girl fall, every aspect of our self-presentation became a consumable nugget and every choice we made became one for “the character arc”. Approaching our lives as a Pinterest board or limited HBO series has been very tiring and I hope many of us nix this internalized audience gaze we have in ourselves as much as possible in 2023. Consider next season cancelled!