As I look through social media, I notice how memes and trends have become part of everything: they circulate on the internet, are used for texts and are even spoken out loud. Memes are sent to friends and family to show feelings and thoughts. Trends are a fun way to have a good time on TikTok. While these can be funny, they can hurt people, rather than make them laugh.
Throughout the internet, trends can hurt people physically. One of the most controversial trends of all time is the Tide Pod challenge. It is where kids take a Tide Pod, eat it or cook it. Becoming popular in 2018, they led to the death of 37 kids in 2018, half of them intentional.
Often passed around due to seeing other people use them, memes and trends are used to become popular on the internet. Children often see a meme on the internet and try to do it themselves, or they see a popular trend going on around social media that they think will make them popular too. The start of where they originated is forgotten, and they can start to lose their real meaning.
According to dictionary.com, the 6-7 meme was one of the most viral memes in 2025, being named word of the year. The actual 6-7 term came from the song “Doot-Doot (6 7)” by Skrilla, released in early 2025. The meme began with a boy in the stands at a basketball game who said six-seven. He was recorded and soon went viral, appearing on many TikTok and YouTube edits. The meme became controversial, as it was becoming a plague at school to the point where teachers had to ban it. A teacher in a New Jersey school was forced to ban the words during educational hours due to students shouting them.
In 2026, the meme died out. While memes like these can be funny, if they get overused or cause disturbances, they need to be toned down.
Another inappropriate trend was when Logan Paul unintentionally started a trend when he found a dead body in a forest in Japan and made a video out of it. The video was controversial due to Paul releasing it on YouTube, even when he knew how inappropriate it was. He and his friends made jokes and laughed about it, causing backlash on them.
A trend originated when people started to repost the video, taking out the part of the dead body, but still including Paul’s reaction. An example of a meme is when someone went and found the forest through Google Maps to post on YouTube, showing how people used the incident to make social media content. Paul later made an apology video that he posted about the incident, where he said that what he posted was inappropriate and immature and that he was sorry about posting the incident.
Even if the trend was not entirely Paul’s fault, people used the incident to create memes and trends without considering how serious it was in the first place.
For some people, not having social media can make them feel left out. They don’t know references that their peers know, making them have to find out from a different place. Ingrid Kryscynski knows how this feels.
“I’m someone who doesn’t have social media,” Kryscynski said. “And that can sometimes make me feel left out and make me have to search things up.”
While memes can be funny and entertaining, they can lead to people making dumb decisions, making their friends feel left out, inappropriate trends and even risking lives. People need to think about what they are posting before they decide to, and when they do, they should think about the consequences it can have on the rest of the world.
