2017·The platform era
Trash Doves
A purple pigeon drawn for a sticker pack that became, without warning, the most-shared image in Thailand.
A looping animation
This Moment spread as an animated file passed from person to person, not as a video upload. Originally published on Facebook.
- SourceNot an upload originally
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
Syd Weiler designed a set of stickers in 2016 featuring a large-eyed purple pigeon. One of them is animated: the bird slams its head up and down with total commitment. Released on Facebook in January 2017, that single sticker became a phenomenon in Thailand within weeks, then everywhere else.
It first appeared in 2017, during the platform era.
It is a good example of virality routing around the place a thing was made for: an American illustrator's sticker pack found its audience in Thailand first, for reasons nobody has satisfactorily explained, and arrived back in the English-speaking internet as an import. The BBC ran a piece essentially asking what it meant, and the honest answer was that it did not mean anything.
Weiler wrote in 2019 about what the episode was actually like — harassment, widespread infringement of the artwork, and depression — which is one of the very few first-person accounts by an artist of having a drawing go globally viral, and it is not a happy one. She later released a second set on her own terms.
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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 spread as an animated file passed from person to person, not as a video upload. Originally published on Facebook.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- Syd Weiler designed a set of stickers in 2016 featuring a large-eyed purple pigeon. One of them is animated: the bird slams its head up and down with total commitment. Released on Facebook in January 2017, that single sticker became a phenomenon in Thailand within weeks, then everywhere else.