2013·The social era
dril
The anonymous account whose tweets became the internet's shared stock of quotations.
A post
This Moment began as a post on social media, not as a video upload. Originally published on Twitter.
- SourceNot an upload originally
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
A pseudonymous account posting since 2008, in the voice of a furiously confident and comprehensively wrong American internet user. The tweets are short, misspelled, and structurally perfect: a man who buys a candle to spite his enemies, who declares himself not owned while shrinking to the size of a corn cob, who eats a bowl of shit for money and then negotiates.
It first appeared in 2013, during the social era.
dril is the central figure of Weird Twitter and, more than that, the most quoted individual writer the platform produced. His tweets are used as templates in political commentary, journalism and academic writing, usually by people who could not name the author. The account has more than 1.8 million followers and has never had a face.
A 2017 doxing incident named the author, who was later identified as Paul Dochney and who has mostly answered press enquiries in character. The tweets have been collected in book form and staged as theatre. That a body of anonymous internet writing is now studied as literature is the account's odd legacy.
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Related
Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as a post on social media, not as a video upload. Originally published on Twitter.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- A pseudonymous account posting since 2008, in the voice of a furiously confident and comprehensively wrong American internet user. The tweets are short, misspelled, and structurally perfect: a man who buys a candle to spite his enemies, who declares himself not owned while shrinking to the size of a corn cob, who eats a bowl of shit for money and then negotiates.